To a Mountain in Tibet(54)
In the last monastery he burnt rhododendron leaves and a juniper twig while the god’s eyes watched him in the lamplight: Chenresig, the many-armed (was that he?). He had offered enough tsampa to alert the god’s attention, he was sure. And lit a butter lamp. Then he had asked that the Chinese leave Tibet; they had taken his grandfather to a camp somewhere, and returned him dead. He remembers his father crying. There was the Great Elephant Cave too, full of hermits’ feats, where he poured out some chang from his thermos. The monk gave him a pill baked from holy clay, which cost a little. At the cemetery he snipped a woollen patch from his chuba, and left it there. He felt lighter after this. His wife left a bead. So the god of death might spare them worse futures. They are clean now.
Our path swerves up through glacial debris to the last ascent. The hills beneath us look rough-skinned, half-created. Their only colours are those we bring, and a sudden, copper-red stain of lichen over the boulders. My head is free of pain, but light, faint. The fear of sickness has faded, and a breathless fatigue rises instead. I climb no more than ten paces before stopping again, heaving for air. The merest extra effort–to mount a ledge or overstep a stone–exacts this gasping price. I wait for the panicky breathlessness of my avalanche ascent to return, but it does not. I fix my eyes on the ground beneath me, patterned with a dull glitter of snow. My feet march like somebody else’s. I steer them from rock to rock. They climb past boulders newly dressed in votive clothes, and oxygen canisters discarded in the clefts. A tuft of hair–human or yak–drifts at my ankles. A horse’s skull shines in the snow.
People die here. Many think it safer to ride than to walk. Kawaguchi, racked by headaches, and even Sven Hedin ascended the pass on yaks. The accident-prone Swami Hamsa was almost swept to his death in an avalanche. Others drowned in the freezing river below Drira Phuk, before a new bridge was built in 1986. The Hindu dead are routinely flown back to India, but others remain on the mountain. Hedin noticed a corpse tumbled into a crevice like a bunch of rags, and recent pilgrims stumbled on the eviscerated torso of a girl.
Even the Tibetans falter sometimes, and fall forward on the boulders, the women’s dark, bright-ringed hands clenching the stone. The Indians ride ashen-faced on their ponies, their mouths masked. Out of the pass ahead an ice-cold wind is blowing. Our breath rasps with weakness or prayer. It dies among the clink and shuffle of hooves and boots. I stop to write these notes, crouched on my knees. My fingers have gone numb, my handwriting broken. Now, as I try to read it, I see only words blurring like cuneiform into the damp from sleet or streaming nostrils. A pilgrim beside me cries out something, but whatever meaning I understood has faded illegibly from the page. So has my worry about Iswor, gone fast ahead. The wider landscape too–the shapes of surrounding peaks–has wandered into gibberish.
The sage Gotsampa, pioneering the kora, became the first to ascend the pass. After straying along the Secret Path of the Dakinis, he was lured here by a posse of twenty-one blue wolves. As he followed them in wonder they dissolved one into another until only a single beast was left, which disappeared into the rock face on the crown of the pass. Then the hermit knew that he had been guided by a vision of the twenty-one Taras, emanations of the goddess of compassion. This was her hill of salvation. Beyond it the way plunges for over a thousand feet into the valley. But here, at the 18,600-foot zenith of the kora, in a moment of blinding transition, pilgrims might pass into purity at the axis of the world.
Now hoarse cries sound above us in the wind, and a hillock of brilliant colour bursts from the gap above. I climb on a wave of relief. The slopes ease apart under a porcelain sky. A few minutes later I am walking through a blaze of prayer flags. They are festooned so thick on everything around that only at their top does the double summit of the boulder sacred to Tara–the Flaming Rock–break free in a surge of granite. The poles from which the flags once flew have long crashed under their weight before the gales that fly through the pass, leaving this formless ocean of parched and vivid pennants heaped on boulders all around. Pilgrims trying to circumambulate the sacred stone flounder among ropes and shrouded rocks. Only here and there, if you part the brilliant curtain from the stone, do you glimpse the mantras blazoned in crimson and yellow, with money glued by butter to the surface, or hanks of hair, even people’s teeth. Stubbornly I plunge across the boulders through this undergrowth. My feet snag among thrown-off clothes, shoes, dishes and animal skulls lying on half-melted ice. But an infectious victory is in the air.
Exhausted pilgrims sit in groups. They feast on tea and roasted barley. Others tear aside the flags to touch their palms and foreheads to the rock. A circle of men crouch in prayer that sounds like purring cats. Two monks sit facing one another in silence, and Hindu pilgrims are passing round their prasada sweets in dazed celebration. From time to time a new arrival breaks into a joyous shout. Prayer leaves scatter in the air and blow away. And once a pair of shamans, their torn robes fringed in scarlet and gold, their hair flying wild, leap up to hurl tsampa into the wind, and cry on and on: ‘Lha-so-so-so! Lha-so-so!’ Victory to the gods!
I slump between their groups, washed in their happiness. Among these stark precipices the artificial riot of flags throws up an almost violent wave of prayer, touching and defiant. Even the farther outcrops are draped in banners where the pawprint left in the rock by Gotsampa’s wolf shows clear to the eye of faith.
The twenty-one dissolving wolves proclaim the goddess of the place. To the Tibetans this protean deity is Drolma, the goddess of liberation, and it is she who forgives their sins and returns them newly pure to the world below. In her favourite guises as the Green and the White Tara, the divinities of motherhood and action, she sits on a throne of lotus and moon, and sometimes extends one leg in readiness to act. But her body may go through rainbow colours, and as the twenty-one Taras (who look almost identical in fresco) she diffuses into multiple benevolence, and she has the power to descend unscathed into hell. Above all she is the deity of pity, born from the tears of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, as he wept at his powerlessness to comfort all living things. Call on her name, evoke her mandala, and she will fly in to the rescue. Her statues speak. She is the mother of the Tibetan people, and has moved through their mortal history as a pious queen or consort, so that illiterate pilgrims know her petition, which is being breathed against her prayer-hung rock as I watch.