To a Mountain in Tibet(9)
These fantasies, of course, were distorted echoes of the earthly Tibet. The country was born in violence–most of its early kings died young–and for centuries it waged aggressive war against itself and others. In this bitter land and climate the people were prey to disease and earthquake, and within living memory worked as indentured labour for an often callous monkhood. The pious Buddhist folk whom travellers knew as gentle, cheerful and honest were haunted by evil spirits and by starvation. Even pilgrims to Kailas were sometimes so impoverished that they took to banditry, which might be punished by public mutilation.
Only after the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959 did the fantasy finally fragment. After the Dalai Lama, with much of the monastic elite, fled into India and beyond, Tibet itself–while never quite emptied of sanctity in the Western mind–became a place of violated innocence, at first brutally persecuted by the Chinese, then half sanitised for the secular gaze. As its homeless Buddhism opened to the West–whether as a faith, a therapy or a fashionable cult–the country itself was lost. In exile, Tibetans looked back (if they remembered) on a land of pained wish-fulfilment.
The country softens and purifies in their absence. The meadows grow apple green, the women beautiful. This is the land of yearning.
Three weeks ago it covered the walls of my hotel in Kathmandu with frescoes of pure consolation: a dream world of herdsmen in trimmed furs and synthetic colours.
The hotel’s owner was a refugee made good. A portrait of the Dalai Lama hung over the reception desk, and photographs of Lhasa in 1937 lined the passages. I asked the receptionist–his hair was flecked with grey–if he could ever go back. Back? he said. He had never been. His parents fled in 1959, and he was born in exile. ‘If I tried to get in, there would be trouble. It’s all right for you. It’s not your country. But the border guards can tell us by our faces.’
I roamed the rooms unhappily, where the pillars dripped with painted gold and the murals were fairy-tale. They did not even depict a remembered country–the land that changes in the exiles’ absence until they are unfit to return. It was a land that never existed at all. Its painted sheep grazed in eternal summer. Nomad tea-drinkers picnicked beside their tents, while an old man sang to his long-stemmed lute, and young men listened. Behind them the cloud-enfolded monasteries dreamed on far hills. And beyond these the perfect hemisphere of Mount Kailas shone like an egg in its cup of mountains, where cave-dwelling hermits radiated the light of other-knowledge, and sanctified the land with prayer.
I wondered again where I was going. This painted mountain had been abstracted into paradise, and turned inert. But to believers, the earthly Kailas is a ladder between light and darkness–its foundations are in hell–and a site of redemptive power. It stirs in the real world, for which the Chinese must fear it. It is older than they.
We come to a high pass. Iswor has preceded me and is resting against a tree, his backpack dropped. We are halfway between Kermi and Yangar villages, and the sun is still high. A few yards shy of the crest, before the valley drops from sight behind us, stretches a short wall of loose stones.
‘Go round it!’ Iswor is rotating his arm clockwise.
I had imagined it a bank of scree cleared from the track. But now I am peering at rocks and stones stacked carefully together. Some are pearl-grey granite, others pitted marble, others the colour of honey or rust. However hard their surfaces, they are all carved with prayers. Several hundred there must be, faded, like a lost language. Their mantras flow with a level delicacy, and sometimes follow the curves and veins of the stone. Many rocks–the most beautiful–are not incised at all. Instead they are chiselled away so that the words stand out in relief, as if freed from the heart of the rock, and the stone itself were speaking. Iswor stares at them, but cannot translate. ‘This is monks’ language,’ he says.
I recognise the downstrokes of the Buddhist refrain, Om mani padme hum, which murmurs all day in the mouths of the devout. This invocation to the goddess of compassion–‘O you who hold the jewelled [rosary] and the lotus!’–has drowned in centuries of esoteric interpretation. Other stones show longer mantras, all in Tibetan script. Whole books, perhaps, are scattered in these rocks. Another carving contains the Buddha’s teaching on the illusoriness of things. So this too is set in stone: that all is transitory.
To circle these walls, as we do, is said to activate all the prayers in them again. They are quaintly moving in their solitude. They must have been built up over generations: stones carved for traders, pilgrims, monks, placed here to appease the spirits of the place–passes are always dangerous–and to breathe compassion to the outer world.
As we descend into the valley beyond, Iswor says the wall is murmuring behind us.
We go down among towering trees to where the Salle Khola tributary joins the Karnali among groves of wild marijuana. Dropping through these cathedral shadows with the first breath of evening, we are intruding on a zone of windless silence. Our boots dislodge cascades of shale or rustle over beds of pine needles. Giant firs and pines surge up between prickly oak and hemlock, and spruce trees hang their pink cones a hundred feet above. Iswor is singing Kathmandu pop songs to himself, but he is far behind me, so that the sudden, solitary drilling of a woodpecker echoes sharp, like a memory, in the valley. I stop in surprise. I try to glimpse the bird, but cannot. The familiar sound intrudes like an eerie signal, as if I were being benignly followed. The woodpecker goes silent; then after a minute, like an echo from childhood, sounds the call of a cuckoo. I have read about Himalayan birds before leaving, but cannot tell if this is the common or the Oriental cuckoo. For the cuckoo is comically complicated. Thus: ‘The Oriental Cuckoo (Cuculus optatus) is a bird belonging to the genus Cuculus in the cuckoo family Cuculidae…Some authors use the names Horsfield’s Cuckoo for optatus and Oriental Cuckoo for saturatus while others use Oriental Cuckoo for optatus and Himalayan Cuckoo for saturatus…’ But both, it seems, sound like a cuckoo clock, and I stop long minutes under the great trees, listening, absurdly entranced, to optatus or saturatus.