To a Mountain in Tibet(53)
‘No.’ He sensed the strain in me, said with faint regret: ‘You know our Buddhist saying?’
Yes, I remember.
From all that he loves, man must part.
Kailas is slipping away. The twin crags of Sharmari are pushing into its place, and its summit has transformed again. From here, with half its northern face occluded by other ranges, it no longer resembles the Eiger at Grindelwald or any mountain I remember. Its dome is light with travelling cloud. Its pendant fans look pretty, like dunces’ hats or hanging bells. The starved air hangs still.
Trekkers at high altitudes sometimes sense a person walking a few paces behind them, just out of sight. Often this person is dead. I never feel this, but once or twice I imagine someone walking a little ahead of me.
I am only nineteen and I am mourning, selfishly, the person you would have been for me. For a while your voice is playful beside me. We are approaching 18,000 feet. Am I all right? Day-dreaming brother. No sense of responsibility. Yes, I am all right.
For a long time I have lost the person I was with you. And I reimagined your face so often that the images overlie you.
The track is steepening. The yaks and jhaboos that had been following the stream bed are lumbering among the pilgrims now. Often I stop against a boulder, gasping for breath, fearing the first spasm of altitude sickness, which does not come. Ahead stretches a long stadium of mountains whose rocks show black against a thickening carpet of snow. All colour has been wrung out of it. Only the sky shines intermittent blue above the flow of ridges into the valley. In this icy air the people are so swathed and goggled that among the fast-moving Tibetans, swinging their strings of prayer beads, their staffs, their thermoses of buttered tea, it is hard to tell Indian from German, Austrian, even a pair of Russians. A herdsman has brought his two mastiffs with him, collared in red wool, for their merit.
The boulders become teeming sites of veneration. We walk through a broken labyrinth of granite: rocks the size of cottages, powder grey, shell pink. Milarepa defeated his Bon rival here by stacking a third giant boulder on to the wizard’s second one, and left behind this toppling pillar, stamped with his footprints.
To the pilgrims there are no mute stones. They disperse and sit familiarly among them. There are boulders that they squeeze between to test their virtue, another that they crawl beneath. The rocks become the judgement of the mountain. One outcrop, named the Place of Black and White Sins, forms a crude tunnel through whose symbolic hell the pilgrim must crush himself before returning down another passage to a higher state. In such crevices the living stone senses the purity of any body passing through, and may contract so violently that the guilty are half entombed.
Three pilgrims, sitting pleasantly together, remember a time when the twin rocks facing them came to judgement. They speak to Iswor haltingly in Tamang, but they cannot enter the rock passage. It looks impassably narrow, and is blocked solid by ice. The thinnest person may be trapped here, they say. The rock knows everything. Two years ago they levered a fat friend through. ‘He was as tall as you!’ they cry at me, and disintegrate into helpless merriment. One of them pushed, two of them pulled, and after half an hour, they say, the man emerged thinner, sinless but bloodied and half suffocated. Could I not wait for the ice to melt?
But the track carries us up again, and the mountain valley closes unsoftened around our strange, heterogeneous trickle of beasts and humans drawn up like iron filings to the pass. We go through intermittent sunlight. Whenever it clouds, the air freezes round us. The crust of snow, printed with yaks’ hooves, is crisp and hard underfoot, even in June. A sharp wind has risen. Far ahead of us, the path elongates along the hillsides, until its pilgrims become snow and granite. We are climbing through a monochrome limbo. Hundreds of cairns and inscribed rocks litter the track and bristle on the skylines. Among their boulders the scarlet scarves of women flicker and disappear again. I am barely an hour from the summit. Somewhere to our right the Drolma river has died away. Impassive trains of yaks, some with blond heads and tails, are marching up behind me, their cloven hooves smiting the rocks, and their riders–anxious Hindus–clinging to padded saddles. And once a whiskered ancient in threadbare trainers, overtaking me at ease, clasps my shoulder in a shaking hand that kindles a shock of warmth.
We come to a sacred rivulet where yaks are drinking. Its tributary is sought above all by butchers, who here wash away the sin of killing animals. Iswor has stopped too, so swathed in scarves that he shows only a pair of watchful eyes. He says: ‘We can’t stay long at this height. My head…’
Another man is walking behind me: a pilgrim, with his wife and child and beast. Recent centuries have not touched him. He has his own. He sees with a bright, focused intensity. He has come from lake country to the north, or perhaps from farther, and the distance brings merit. He prostrates often to the god mountain, and the earth feels hot under him. The prayer’s words are strong, although he does not understand them, and the gods breathe back from the summits. He has remembered everything the village shaman spoke of, and placated the klu in the stream, in case they are there. The water’s coldness comes cleansing to the touch. He puts it in a phial for his sick mother. That is what he has come for, and for the black earth-lords to spare his barley crop, and for the calving of the third yak. These are the great things. His wife, whom he shares with his brother, has other thoughts. Women’s. He knows what they are, he thinks.