To a Mountain in Tibet(55)
It is the custom to leave some object on Drolma’s pass, and to take something else away. Iswor, who is waiting for me, has brought a string of prayer flags from Darchen, and together we stretch them among the others. But he is feeling vaguely ill again. Under the scarf-swathed cap, the dark glasses, the glisten of sun cream, I imagine his face too pale. He wants to go down fast, but is ashamed to abandon me. He carries a heavy pack; I, almost nothing. I urge him away.
For a while I linger, reluctant to leave, although the sun has clouded. Other pilgrims are starting to trickle away. I wait, as if something might happen. But there is only the sandpaper wind and the paling sky. The air is thinner than any I have sensed. The euphoria of those around me lifts into momentary chanting that touches me like a benign contagion.
Deep in one pocket I find the sandalwood incense-sticks that Tashi had given me to burn for him on the pass. He had said: ‘I think I will never reach there myself. But you will have gone for me.’
I scrutinise the packet in the hardening wind. It reads: ‘Not only to please the Buddhas and Guardian divinities, but also to satiate the ordinary beings from the six realms and pacify demons and obstacle makers (sandalwood and secret substances).’
I have forgotten to bring matches, but a fervent youth–prayer beads in one hand, a camera in the other–offers me his cigarette lighter. After a long time I ignite a sheaf and shelter it among some flags. I call up Tashi’s memory in the teeth of the wind. Then I start down.
One mile and 1,400 near-vertical feet to the valley below, and I am starting too late for comfort. The trail plummets over flint-sharp rocks, down the spine of a precipitous ridge with no end in sight, nothing to soften the grey wreckage underfoot, no hint of grass or flower. The path is too steep for yaks, and the ponies go riderless.
But almost at once the tarn of Gaurikund–among the highest lakes in the world–appears in a basin just below. Dark under its cliffs, ringed by the cloudy jade of softening ice, its centre is still pure snow, and the way down to it so arduous that few pilgrims attempt it. Buddhists call it the Lake of Mercy. It is the bathing pool of the sky-dancers, and of the goddess Parvati, wife of Shiva, who seduced him by her ablutions. Only in late summer do hardy pilgrims clamber down to collect the water, and pour it over their heads as a freezing baptism.
I pass a fresh sari, beautiful in purple and gold, discarded on the path. Nearby a sad-faced Hindu lies propped among rocks, gazing at the lake. He calls out to me: ‘How far is it to the valley? How many hours?’
I hazard a guess. He is an Indian from Malaysia, and has never seen anywhere like this. ‘I didn’t understand, I thought it would be easy. Yet here I am.’ He looks finished. ‘But the others have gone.’
‘Gone where?’
‘Only seven of our group made it, out of twenty-three.’
‘But you’re over the hardest now.’
‘We were told that if we bathed in Manasarovar, and finished the parikrama of Kailas, everything would be all right…’
‘That you would gain merit? Perhaps moksha?’ This is the Hindu nirvana.
‘Perhaps.’ But the word comes so drained, so disheartened, that it seems irrelevant. It is the long descent ahead that obsesses him. ‘The other six have gone in front of me.’ He touches my arm. ‘Will there be horses at the bottom?’
‘Yes, there will be horses.’ I am guessing again. ‘And the way will be level.’ That much I know. ‘It’s a river valley. Beautiful.’
He wavers to his feet as I leave him. It is long before dusk, but a deep, sunless cold is settling in. The knee-jarring descent is still dotted with pilgrims. They clasp one another’s hands as they go, still praying, and even now stop to touch their fingers to rocks dented by Milarepa’s feet–stones smeared with cotton threads and yak butter–or add a pebble to a cairn. I glimpse Iswor, two hundred feet below me, waiting, and blunder down among loosened shale. A flotsam of empty cans and cigarette cartons strews the way, as if even litter becomes holy here. On either side the slopes sink in diagonal blades towards the Lham-chu valley, while the skyline shatters into crags. High to our right a black peak named the Axe of Karma threatens the sky, but not (it is said) the pilgrim walking in Tara’s grace.
I come at last into a valley soft with evening sun. Beyond an isolated rock imprinted by the Buddha, the Lham river flows through level grasslands, and nomad horses tinkle on its far side. I have eight miles to go, but the way is easy beside sliding rivulets, shielded by mountains converted to Buddhism long ago. From another prostration platform the eastern tip of Kailas momentarily breaks into view, while to my left gleams the mountain of the Medicine Buddha, whose slopes are spread with healing herbs and minerals.
The sun has set by the time I reach camp. A few stars are out, and the meadows under Zutrul Phuk monastery, the Cave of Miracles, are quiet with sleeping yaks and foreign tents. Ram, who has glided ahead of us all day, augments our iron rations with warming soup. We sit silent together, while the night cold waits outside. Now that the pass is behind us, we all seem drained. We spread our sleeping bags on the hard earth as if its stones were velvet. For a while I write notes by torchlight, trying to recall the colour of pilgrims’ clothes, the texture of rocks on the pass. But my fingers are stiff with cold, and I soon give up. In the minutes before sleep, a shadowy melancholy descends: the bewilderment when something long awaited has gone.