In the valley below Muchu, the Karnali river bends suddenly north through impa.s.sable gorges, and will rejoin our track only on the Tibetan frontier. Meanwhile Iswor points us to where the tributary of k.u.muchhiya falls steeply from the west. On the ridge beyond Muchu we pa.s.s a mani wall and a chortenone of those stupa-like cenotaphs that Tibetan peoples cherishand reach a half-derelict police post. The site had been abandoned to Maoist guerrillas long ago, but for two years now a twelve-man police squad from Kathmandu had reluctantly returned: slight, dark men, isolated and perhaps a little afraid. A wary sergeant scans our permits and sends us on.

We go steeply down. Log bridges carry us to the tributary's north bank. It is almost noon. The land is stripped of trees. The river whitens far ahead of us, splaying round stranded boulders. Only patches of scrub hold to the nearer hills, which have often eroded to whorls of naked rock, and the shale makes yellow forks against the mountains.

As our path steepens up the valley, Iswor asks: 'How are you feeling?' He sounds concerned. 'Are you okay?'

Yes, so far I am. But I listen to my body now. Old wounds gently remind me of themselves, like voices echoing: a knee cartilage damaged since boyhood, an ankle ligament torn in Syria, a fractured spine from a road accident. They return only in nudges and twinges, but I recognise them with suppressed unease: who would evacuate us out of these hills?

I tell myself and Iswor: 'I'm fine. Absolutely fine Absolutely fine,' and for some reason we laugh.

The journey does not nurture reflection, as I once hoped. The going is too hard, too steep. Every footstep on the stone-littered track needs a tiny, half-conscious decision, and brings its attrition unnoticed. Only in dreamlike intervals, perched on a rock while Iswor rests his load, can I imagine the path as oddly intimate to me, like a memory trace.

You look back down the valley and wonder: how did I come so far? A few minutes ago, or perhaps an hour, you pa.s.sed a trader's sheltera sheepskin draped between rocksand now it has dwindled to a fleck below you. Perhaps, after all, you have walked this path unawares, drugged by the rhythm of your boots, as if dreaming, and only a pa.s.sage of startling beauty or hardship wrenched you awake. In this thinning air you even imagine you may be nearing the end. But the speechless white mountain ahead is not Kailas, of course. Kailas, in your reverie, hangs like a stage prop out of sight, waiting. As the crow flies it is barely fifty miles away: but in another country, another ether.

To Hindus, 'departure for Kailas' is a metaphor for death.

A young Tibetan monk from Yalbang overtakes us, making for Taklakot, where he will buy Chinese shoes for his monastery. He is travelling fast, in plain clothes, without a pa.s.sport. He is buoyant and sure. He will slip past the border guards incognito, he says, no problem. But among the rough traders along the way he looks innocent and placeless, as if nothing has ever touched him. He wears a bobble hat and carries a furled umbrella. He left his home long ago, he says, and walked to the Yalbang monastery. 'Compared to my teacher, I love my parents only a little now.' He signals this dwindled affection with two narrowing fingers, and smiles. 'My teacher is my true father.' After a while he strides ahead alone along the mountain, singing with mysterious merriment. You might imagine he comes from a land free of evil. Travellers have always marvelled at the Tibetans' light hearts, as they think them. As long ago as the tenth century the Arab geographer Masudi wrote of a people beyond the Himalayas who laughed even in bereavement.

The monk shrinks to a dot ahead of me. He has taken Iswor with him, talking cheerily, and I see them ascending farther and farther where the track dissolves into the debris of an avalanche. By the time I reach it they are high above me, still climbing. Its petrified flood has become our stairway upwards. Its rocks look raw and new, as if the carapace of the mountain had been ripped open in a vertical wound. For hours, it seems, I am toiling upwards. The stones shift and grate underfoot. My body no longer seems quite my own. The landslide is so long and steep that I dare not look up for its end. Instead I fix my eyes on a boulder fifty yards away, perhaps, and reach it like a swimmer in a storm. For long minutes I am slumped on rocks, gasping, my legs gone. I turn my back and stare down at the distant river and flayed hills, calming my heart, wondering why I am doing this, before standing upright and starting again. Now the rock fall seems to be pushing physically against me. The sun blazes above. I start counting my steps, and even the stones under my feet: grey, cinnamon red, intricately veined. Then my trekking pole snaps in the shale. I think: if things are like this at 11,000 feet, how will they be at over 18,500, where I am going? Now, for fear of losing heart at the gully opening ahead, I barely lift my gaze from the rocks a step in front of me.

Slowly I am invaded by a different, profound tiredness, less muscular fatigue than an overwhelming longing to sleep. It is a little like despair. If it were not for glimpsing Iswor waiting above, I might curl up among the rocks and close my eyes. As it is, with suppressed alarm, I wonder for the first time if I will finish this journey.

Suddenly, in bewilderment, I feel the air too thin to sustain me. It is changed, empty. But there is nothing else. I am inhaling in panicky gasps. Nothing remains but this thread of oxygen. It is not enough. Barely enough. Faint, I am lying on stones. The air is receding from me, everything depleted. My breath is rasping sobs.

For long minutes I remain inert as my lungs calm and the fear fades. A memory rises, a pang of sadness, which for a moment I cannot locate. I stand up gingerly and open my mouth to the faint breeze. But the air in my memory is normal. It is her heart that is failing. My own breath stills. Only with consciously deepened inhalations has the shock pa.s.sed, and the fragile trinity of heart, lungs and blood composed itself.

As she calls out for air, I hook the oxygen mask over her face, and turn on the cylinder. Her hands come up to clasp it, comforted. I can give her twelve minutes, the doctor said, after that it is dangerous. But when I remove the mask, my mother's hands go on clutching it. It is as if I were taking away her life. Later she says: 'Next year I won't be like this. Next year I'll be looking after you.'

In the hospital ward, beyond the curtains closing off the bed, the voices of other patients ring out normal, ugly. A woman upbraids her daughter for visiting her late. Another says she wants to go back to East Grinstead, where her sister can nurse her. A visiting husband recounts a failed burglary at his office. Somebody says: 'I know I'm self-pitying, but I can't help it...'

But she hears nothing. Only sometimes her hand clasps mine.

In the ward at night: the wheezing of oxygen, moans and dreams. Winking lights. Who or what is she clasping? Am I still there? The nurses know less than I do. Somebody cries out in another ward.

Morning voices outside our curtains again. I am angry that they will live on.

She lies at last in silence, turned to the window, and her face is young again.

At evening we near the foot of the Torea pa.s.s. I hear my breathing with remote amazement. I remember ancient juniper trees along the way, shedding their bark in swathes, like the remains of some long-discarded incarnation. Ram has set up our tents on a plateau above the track. I fall into mine without eating or undressing, and sleep for nine hours.

CHAPTER SIX.

In his monastery's garden in Kathmandu, Tashi talked of the retreat from secular life not only as a deliverance from hardship but as the path to a kind of purity. He imagines his native Bhutan to be the heir and guardian of Tibetan Buddhism.

'They say we are like Tibet used to be. In my village the moment you step out of doors you sense people's faith. In the marketplace, on the street. It's not like here in Kathmandu. Here, the moment I'm beyond the monastery gates the beggars come crowding in and people are hara.s.sing you to buy things. And so you feel pity. You want to please them, you want to give, but you cannot. In my village there's nothing like that. We were a family of ten, and we were happy. But I haven't been back for four years. When the winter holidays come, only I am missing.'

'Is it so far?'

'Yes, it's far. Once a year I speak to my mother on the phone, just to hear her voice.' He smiled. 'I miss them.'

'Why did you leave?'

'Our lives were very poor. When I saw how my parents worked in the fields, and how they had to take my eldest sister out of school to join them, I knew I didn't want that life. I don't know how much my father had to cheat and lie in order to feed useight children. He had a job looking after the company armoury, but would leave it to catch fish whenever he could. He must have caused suffering to many fish, to feed us...What do Christians say about things like that?'

I rummaged in my memory. But Jesus's apostles left the lake of Galilee not out of pity for fish, but concern for humans. Tashi's face had an almost contrite gentleness. When I looked at him, I wondered how compa.s.sion formed. But he answered that Buddhism was a science, that compa.s.sion could be taught, that you could train for it. Just as you could steer yourself away from s.e.x, if you had the will.

I asked: 'Have you never wanted to marry?'

'In the village I have married friends, happy with their children. But it's not for me. Marriage means trouble. I couldn't cope with it.'

He laughed without embarra.s.sment. I could not tell what, if anything, this artless reply concealed, from me or from himself. He folded his robes more closely round his shoulders. 'I was fifteen when I thought: I want to be a monk.'

The poverty from which Tashi fled is printed on all these villages of the high Himalaya, whose idyll is a mirage. Beyond 11,000 feet, erosion gashes half the slopes, and stains them with arteries of drifting scree. My group goes in happy disorder, Ram swinging a can of paraffin, Dhabu clutching the ludicrously awkward stove before him like a totem, Pearl his horse sauntering in front, piled with the tents. In this stripped land I soon see them moving effortlessly a mile or more ahead of us.

We are ascending an empty valley. On either side the snow ranges no longer shine beyond dark-wooded foothills in a dimension of their own, but barge straight down in naked spurs into the abyss where their snowmelt joins the river. As the sun clouds, the air grows cold. Iswor has exchanged his shorts for army fatigues, and is worrying about his hair ('It looks like a yak's coat'). When we cross the 12,000-foot Torea pa.s.s, my earlier breathlessness is only a memory. The land is starkly beautiful. The clouds that push from the side valleys hang almost at eye level. The high snows, closing off our pa.s.sage at either end, rea.s.semble as we walk, sliding aside to reveal mountains higher still. The valley is tightening round us. In the stunted scrub the birdsong thins to plaintive clicks and cheeps, and then to silence.

Into this stillness the traders come swinging round the mountainsides behind their files of mules and horses. We follow their trail for hoursthe soles of discarded shoes, excrement, dribbles in the dust (the animals urinate on the move), sc.r.a.ps of faded cloth and broken harness. They are all Bhotias and local Tibetans now, swarthy, wild-faced men whose backs are sheathed in fleeces and yak pelts and foreheads rumpled by headbands to steady their toppling loads. They camp where they can, in caves and abandoned sheep pens. One of them stops dead on the path before me ('He hasn't seen a Westerner before,' says Iswor) and fixes me unbudging with a black, fascinated stare, while his s.h.a.ggy train of jhaboo jhaboosa hybrid of the sleepy Indian cow and the recalcitrant yakwanders on untended.

On the far side of the river a tortuous and faded trail takes its own way to Tibet westwards above the dwindling k.u.muchhiya. It was by this route that Gyato w.a.n.gdu, the last Khampa freedom fighter against the Chinese, led his tiny force towards the safety of India. The Khampa warrior tribesmen of eastern Tibet had fought the Chinese occupation ever since 1956, and retreated at last to guerrilla bases over the Nepalese border, nurtured by the CIA. But as the Western rapprochement with China began, the United States withdrew its support, and in July 1974 the Dalai Lama asked the depleted warriors to lay down their arms to the Nepalese army. They did so with proud reluctance. Some of them preferred suicide by drowning or slitting their throats. Only their charismatic leader w.a.n.gdu, with a handful of followers, made as if to obey, then rode defiantly away. The Chinese and Nepalese armies hunted him down, and it was by the goat track climbing westwards from where we walked that he opted for a drastic short cut to India and safety. Some twenty miles beyond, and barely five miles from the border, he was ambushed by the Nepalese and fell in a hail of bullets: the last, hopeless spark of his people's armed resistance.

Now at the track's foot the village of Yari is soft with fields of barley and millet. It is a tiny, scattered place where the Bhotia squaws and their ruffianly men, sporting scant turbans, have cleared the earth for crops, piling the excavated rocks alongside, and the valley higher up alternates tilled brown fields with tracts of brilliant green, where wooden conduits bring down water.

After a mile this oasis falls behind. We are approaching 13,000 feet, and a chill wind is blowing fine dust up the valley behind us. Our way snakes across balding scrublands. The track is seared to rubble. Above us the last rivulets drop from the high snows, nudging stones down slopes already cobwebbed with shale. Once we hear goatherds whistling to their flocks far below.

As we go higher, the horizon ahead starts to mesmerise. The snowfields that gleam through the valley cleft resemble an isolated mountain (in fact they are part of a range) and bring a surge of excitement. By the time we pitch our tents under the Nara pa.s.s, a heady expectation has set in. For this 15,000-foot defile is our last barrier before Tibet. Now a cold, light rain comes down. I lie in my tent, waiting for it to pa.s.s, and imagining the view from the summit of the Nara-la tomorrow. The intimation of change that frontiers bring, a whisper even of revelation, is heightened in this rarefied air by the unearthly aura still shed from Tibet. All myth, I know, should have been wiped from the despoiled country long ago. Yet under this last, formidable pa.s.s the afterglow continues of a land breathing an air of its own, and entered through a mystic gap in the mountains and a breach in time. I open my map to see how close we are. The rain clatters like hail on the tent roof. Even on the map's large scale the frontier is only a little finger's breadth away.

This feel of entering a sanctuary has not only moved travellers but has haunted the Tibetans themselves. For centuries they have envisaged a holy land of their own, invisible or inaccessibly remote. The precise location of this kingdom of Shambala is uncertain, but it is said to lie encircled by impa.s.sable snow peaks somewhere north of Kailas. Yogis have thought it a three-month journey beyond the mountain, but the path is so elusive that pilgrims find themselves wandering hopelessly. Some even have a notion that Shambala floats in another dimension of time, as if through a galactic wormhole, and can be accessed only by ice doors in the Himalaya. Patterned like an eight-petalled lotus, radiating tributary kingdoms, it has been ruled for two and a half millennia by a dynasty of G.o.dly kings who reside in a jewel-built palace, as at the heart of a gorgeous mandala. No word for 'enemy' or 'war' is known here. Its founding king was taught by the Buddha himself, and as his subjects grew more selfless, so their country faded from human sight. Yet its rulers continue to watch over the human world, and after 400 years, as that world falls deeper into ruin, the last redeemer king will ride out from his sanctum to inst.i.tute a golden age.

In the West, even before the fictional creation of Shangri-La, people toyed with the idea that Shambala geographically existed. The nineteenth-century Hungarian scholar de Koros reckoned he had pinpointed it by astronomic calculation, and in the late 1920s the Russian Nicholas Roerich undertook a long, earnest expedition in constant apprehension of it.

The origins of the myth may lie in the memory of some lost homeland, perhaps the kingdom of Shang-shung around Kailas, subsumed by war in the eighth century. But more likely it entered Tibet from India two and a half centuries later, in the mystical scripture called the Kalacakra Tantra, which details the meditational pathway to Shambala. This teaching, long precious to Tibetan Buddhism, has today accrued a poignant promise. To some, the Chinese ruin of their homeland portends the coming salvation. The Dalai Lama, who believes that a hidden Shambala actually exists, has many times given the Kalacakra initiation in public, gathering souls towards a paradise of several meanings. To those with purified eyes, Shambala exists on earth, while tantric adepts reach its holy land in meditation. But still others imagine it an empire of the future, to be established in the year 2425, when the peace-spreading armies of the last king burst from their mountain cloister.

Meanwhile other sanctuaries pervade the land. The secret entrances to these beyul beyul, it is said, were described in buried treasure texts by Padmasambhava, and will be revealed in times of peril. A few beyul beyul have already been discovered and settled by expectant communities in the remote Himalaya. To the mundane eye they are no more than tranquil valleys; but to the initiate they shimmer with mystic potential. After the Chinese invasion, it is said, certain lamas led their disciples into the wastelands in search of these have already been discovered and settled by expectant communities in the remote Himalaya. To the mundane eye they are no more than tranquil valleys; but to the initiate they shimmer with mystic potential. After the Chinese invasion, it is said, certain lamas led their disciples into the wastelands in search of these beyul beyul, following the abstruse directions of sacred texts. Some gave up in despair, but others, it was rumoured, entered cliffs and waterfalls, and vanished beyond human time for ever.

For an hour, as the sun descends, a hard wind blows dust up the valley and into our tents. The rain has lightened. Beneath us the last tributary has drifted and died westwards, and the balding slopes cradle a floor of sudden green called the Sipsip Meadows, strewn with isolated rocks. Snowmelt threads the gra.s.s in icy rivulets, while above us the Nara pa.s.s is black with cloud. In the dusk I go down towards a ma.s.sive boulder stranded in the valley. The air is still, purified. The last birdsong has petered out. Only a half-tame finch with white underwings gets up from under my feet, and black b.u.t.terflies are feeding on the dust.

All day the only plants I have noticed are the worn tapestries of broom over sheltered slopes, and a coral-coloured rock rose flaring alone. Hour after hour a colourless erosion has been setting in. But now, underfoot, spreads a glaze of delicate flowers I do not know, and the ground-hugging shrubs are starred with lemony blooms. It is easy to understand how the first field botanists heremen like Kingdon-Ward and George Sherriffbecame obsessed by these brilliant outpourings into the void, and could risk their lives hunting Primula eburnea Primula eburnea or the blue poppy. It is like spring in the Arctic tundra. Your eyes drop from the empty mountains to this fragile-looking parquetry. White anemones spring up among the brush, and nests of deep pink buds are opening. or the blue poppy. It is like spring in the Arctic tundra. Your eyes drop from the empty mountains to this fragile-looking parquetry. White anemones spring up among the brush, and nests of deep pink buds are opening.

It is nightfall when I reach the boulder. It bulges ancient and solitary above the valley. I can descry faint carvings on it, and somebody in these solitudes has picked out in blue chalk the Om mani padme hum Om mani padme hum inscribed on its northern face. But its sculptured Buddhas have almost faded. They float across it on their lotus thrones, their hands cupped or raised or vanished. They must have been carved here to sanctify the pre-Buddhist wildernessthe pa.s.ses swarm with pagan spiritsbut the hands lifted in blessing are barely discernible now, and the haloed heads have withdrawn into the stone. inscribed on its northern face. But its sculptured Buddhas have almost faded. They float across it on their lotus thrones, their hands cupped or raised or vanished. They must have been carved here to sanctify the pre-Buddhist wildernessthe pa.s.ses swarm with pagan spiritsbut the hands lifted in blessing are barely discernible now, and the haloed heads have withdrawn into the stone.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

At first light a herd of goats comes jostling and trampling through our campsite. Their herdsmen are Humla traders in conical caps and buccaneer headscarves, who let out whistling yells as their charges canter between the tents. Every goat carries on its back a little faded saddle-pack filled with salt from Tibet, which will be carried south for ten or fifteen days to be exchanged for grain or rice on the return journey.

This immemorial trade is dying now. Iodised salt from India is selling in the foothills, but a profit can still be made if the herd is as numerous as this one. Its goats are robust but mercurial. No two are alike. Dilapidated white faces peer from tangled black coats, and creamy fleeces charge alongside rufous and skewbald ones. Their horns are magnificently various. Some twirl upwards in barley-sugar spires, lending their owners a rakish and debonair authority; others sweep back as if wind-blown; still others coil demurely against the head, like old-fashioned curls, or droop uselessly downward. But one and all have insolent yellow eyes and devil-may-care tempers, so the stocky sheepdogs run busy alongside, and wherever the goats pa.s.s their grazing deepens erosion.

A century ago this traffic was the lifeblood of Humla. Salt and borax from the alkaline Tibetan lakes sold like gold dust on the Nepalese plains, along with the prized Tibetan wool; and the sheep and goat trains returned to Tibet with foodstuffs and the wares of British India: kerosene, soap, matches, even trilby hats. Before the Chinese closed the border in the 1960s, Tibetan tribespeople were a frequent sight on these paths, trading wool for grain. In winter they reached Kathmandu to deal in precious stones, and their communal friendships with Nepalese merchants would be sealed by vows to Kailas and its holy lake.

Chinese regulations have destroyed these old partnerships, or driven them underground, and the goods entering Tibet from China have drastically tilted the trade balance. In exchange for Chinese manufacturesincluding alcoholcomes the clandestine trade in timber, and now, as the goats flood down the valley in a commotion of dust and bells, a caravan of thirty yaks and jhaboo jhaboos is heading the other way, shouldering pine logs towards the pa.s.s. Beneath the yaks' s.h.a.ggy petticoats their tread is slow, almost delicate. Their heads stoop, as if overwhelmed by the weight of their ma.s.sive horns. Their manes jangle with ta.s.selled bells. They are all but immune to the snow that can bury the sheep and goats on these high pa.s.ses, and the isolated police are either bribed or turn a blind eye to their pa.s.sage.

We break camp as they go. The tatters of night rain hang about the valley to our east. Clouds like battle-smoke drift against the farther mountains, parting here and there to reveal disembodied crags and ridges. Above us the Nara pa.s.s is misted into the sky, and our track thins to a stony path that curves around the shoulder of a mountain we cannot see. We climb by shelves of lichened rock and shale, and hear the last snowmelt trickling alongside. The air feels wrong, as if it holds nothing in it. We are ascending 2,000 feet in less than three hours. For the first time I hear Iswor pant, whereas Ram, who comes from a region near Everest, blithely overtakes us and disappears into the mist. I shorten my steps, inhale deeper. I fear the first throbbing of alt.i.tude sickness, but feel nothing. We are approaching the 15,000-foot summit, but my breathless gasping, with its pang of memory, does not return.

An old Bhotia merchant descends towards us with two mules. As he draws near, he lets out a plaintive cry. He needs medicine. Pointing back to the pa.s.s where he has come, he touches his chest, coughs and chokes. It is the noise of an old engine trying to start up. Guiltily I hand him aspirin, which cannot palliate him. Iswor says: 'I think no good.' The trouble sounds deep inside the old man's lungs or heart. He stoops his thanks and smiles sadly, hardily. I want to take him in my arms. He drives his mules on, without turning.

The low-clinging cloud has lifted behind us, and suddenly we are walking in sunlight, our shadows sharp underfoot. The mountains stand in thinner, clearer air. All across the horizon now they shine in unearthly clarity, piled on one another in pyramids and flying b.u.t.tresses of snow. To the north the peaks of the Nalakanka Himal harden in the sunlight, and confront us like a cold amphitheatre on the naked track.

Soundlessly above me, a lammergeyer comes flying out of the pa.s.s on motionless wings. The craning of its head shows clear from far below, and its slim, buff body gleams like a bra.s.s torpedo between dusky underwings. With no beat of its ten-foot wings, it quarters the slopes below me in leisurely glides, perhaps seeking a thermal on which to rise, then plummets from sight.

We follow its flight path with awe, then turn uphill again. A cold wind hits us as we near the head of the pa.s.s, and out of nowhere a light, hard snow is falling. A few minutes later we are lying under a cairn of pallid stones on the summit. It is crowned by bleached tangles of prayer flags. They are strung across the path like old clotheslines, and rasp and stretch in the ice-filled wind. Every traveller who pa.s.ses tosses another stone on the man-made heap, and sometimes shouts a greeting to the local G.o.ds. But we are alone. The snow trickles like blossom over us. The prayer flags are Buddhist, of course, but the spirits of the place are older than faith, and spiteful. The nyen nyen live on mountaintops close to the sky. The cairns are their altars. They unleash blizzards and avalanches, brew up blinding mists. It is wise to offer them a stone. More trouble still are the live on mountaintops close to the sky. The cairns are their altars. They unleash blizzards and avalanches, brew up blinding mists. It is wise to offer them a stone. More trouble still are the tsen tsen, who materialise out of thin air. They were said to be powerful in the days of Shang-shung kings, around Kailas, and they ride red-skinned and armoured through the mountains, shooting plague-tipped arrows. Iswor offers them a second stone, and we lie back at peace under the falling snow.

It is not hard to see in these spirits a memory of Tibetan raiders, who centuries ago descended the pa.s.ses in chain mail, their faces daubed with ochre. Such traces of a militant people defy the later image of a remote and otherworldly theocracy, but the country's early history suggests a people in love with war. In the seventh and eighth centuries, when the Tang dynasty reached its height, the Tibetan armies with their Turkish auxiliaries marched through the Chinese empire and sacked the capital, Changan, a thousand miles to the east. For generations Tibet stood on a war footing, and its armour was the finest in the world. The Chinese wrote in awe that impenetrable chain mail sheathed the elite spearmeneven horsesfrom head to toe, and that in battle they never retreated, but a new rank of soldiers moved implacably into the place of the fallen. They could field 200,000 men at a time, it was said, and despised a tranquil death. For two centuries they dominated the southern Silk Road oases, reaching even Samarkand, so that the Arab caliph Haroun-al-Rashid sought alliance with the Chinese against them. Southwards they thrust beyond Nepal and crossed the Indian plain to invade Burma.

Even after Buddhism filled the land with monasteries, the monks protected their faith with arms. Alongside lives of prayer and meditation, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were rife with monastic civil war, sometimes waged in league with Mongol chiefs, and the Dalai Lamas (if they were not murdered in childhood) were complicit in violence even into the early twentieth century. Travellers often noted in the Tibetan men an earthy emotionalism, quick to draw a dagger, and into the mid-century dacoits and predatory nomads, armed with matchlocks and Russian revolvers, were the plague of pilgrims.

A few paces over the Nara-la, the snow is thinning away. As we crest the pa.s.s, an enormous mountain barrier rises to meet us. Nothing sounds but the wind in our ears, even the purling of snow water gone. Here, where the Nepalese Himalaya drop in giant steps to the plateaux of Tibet, the last mountain walls, slashed by gullies, climb vertiginously north toward Kailas and the peaks beyond, lit by the gleam of glaciers in mid-air, and ridges hollowed with unmelting snow.

Under these obliterating skylines we descend a widening valley, where the Karnali, re-emerging from impa.s.sable gorges, cuts a corridor at last into sunlight. Between one step and another a stark change comes down. Centuries of monsoons have exhausted themselves over the heights behind us, and on this bitter counterscarp only blackened scrub survives. Precipitously beneath us the last grey-pink ravines of Nepal plunge to the Karnali, then level out towards another country. All becomes light and sky. Far to our north-west there opens up a land of planetary strangeness, empty of life, under a void of brilliant blue. We are gazing at a tableland that was once the Tethys Sea. Forty-five million years ago, as the tectonic plate of Indiathen a separate continentcrashed into the underbelly of Asia, and the Himalaya erupted to the south, this primordial ocean drained away. Marine fossils still exist in the Tibetan plateau, betraying that the highest country in the world was once an ocean.

As we struggle down the fault line of this momentous convulsion, a new vista eases open. In this rarefied air, where a person may be distinctly descried ten miles off, I glimpse with a catch of the heart the violet-tinged steppes of Tibet shelving north-west. Beyond them, an unbroken line of mountains glimmers across the horizon under cauliflower clouds that look as static as they are; while in the distant north floats the 25,000-foot Gurla Mandhata, which shines above the holy lake of Manasarovar. In its vivid stillness the land might be a painted backdrop slotted into the valley cleft beyond us. The artist wanted to express an inhuman tranquillity, and thought up this.

The country is fearsomely alone. The same geologic clash that created the Tibetan plateau circled it with the mountains that protect and desiccate it: the Karakoram in the west, the desert-swept Kunlun to the north. Even in the more vulnerable east, hundreds of miles of near-empty upland divide Tibet from the nearest easy habitat. Of its few million inhabitants, most are crowded into the more fertile valleys of the south-east. Compared to these, the far west, where we are going, is still more pitilessly dry and cold. In this thinned air, three miles above sea level, drastic temperature changes crack boulders and pulverise cliffs. The sun's radiation is so intense that its heat surges from the earth to draw in icy winds and dust storms that sandpaper the land smooth. In a single day snowfall may alternate with thunder, hail and blistering sun.

We clamber down towards the frontier by slopes already fractured and slippery. Torrents of shale oversweep the track. The colours around us are pastel grey and sh.e.l.l pink. Whole valley sides are a confusion of debris sliding between shields of darker rock. Their spurs bulge like flayed bones. Sometimes our way is littered with igneous boulders that glint like beetles' wings, and once we trudge across virgin snow.

The Karnali winds green beneath us, flowing fast from the gorges where we have not followed it. Take a careless step and you could slide unstoppably 200 feet or more into its ravine. We reach it at last down knee-jarring rocks and gravel, and a few minutes later we are walking into the frontier settlement of Hilsa.

Ten years ago, Iswor says, Hilsa was no more than a huddle of cottages and tents. Now it drifts along the river in a sordid trickle of blue-grey stone, half-built or deserted dwellings, and its tottering wooden gangplank has been replaced by a clanking cable suspension bridge, hung with prayer flags and washing. Cascades of rubbish pour beneath it into the river: Chinese beer bottles and layers-deep plastic. The Tibetan frontier is on the far side, a few hundred yards away. A Chinese road is being stretched down close to the Karnali to the grumble of bulldozers. The traders' caravans cross the bridge with bovine ease, the yaks and jhaboo jhaboos indifferent to the thin treads under their hooves and to the river boiling fifty feet below. Flagrantly they carry their contraband timber to the trading post of Sher over the low hill beyond, where they exchange it at knockdown prices for clothes, flour and drink. On our side the police post is busy dealing in alcohol.

We find a hostel for Nepalese merchants. Its dirt-floored rooms are disintegrating around a courtyard piled with yak dung for winter fuel. Our beds are planks propped against the walls. Wooden saddles and rotting harness lie stacked under them. Whenever we doze, the smeared windows darken with the faces of children peering fascinated in. This Thakuri family has moved from poverty downriver, bringing their estate with themthree ponies and a cowhoping to prosper here. But they have only found poverty again. They are listless and shy. The father wears an England football vest, made in China. He hopes to attract trekkers. And he dreams of merchants bedding down while their beasts slumber in the dung-filled courtyard, as in some Arab caravanserai. But there is n.o.body but us, and his children playing in the dust.

We sit in their room at evening with a group of silent neighbours, while his wife brews tea and suckles a weak baby under her pullover. Sometimes, the man says, they are allowed to take a sick child to the Tibetan clinic over the river. They have crossed the border often, to trade something in Taklakot. But on this side there is no clinic, no school. 'We wait for things to get better. The Maoists are gone now. They are in Kathmandu.' They glance uncertainly at one another. 'We have never been to Kathmandu.'

Soon afterwards the flue from their stove, which zigzags in rusty segments to the roof, turns red hot and sparks the timber ceiling into flames. The men gaze at it unmoving, as if at their fate, while the woman plucks the baby from her breast and scrambles on to the roof with a jug of water.

Their depression starts to affect us. We hand out medicine for their chest coughs and headachesthey accept it without a wordthen trail away to sleep. Iswor does not trust this place, and Ram jams the door shut with trekking poles. For a long time I lie on the plank bed, unsleeping. The light of a gibbous moon trickles through the grimed window and on to the mud floor. I watch it moving like a promise. In a week's time this moon will have filled out to mark the Buddhist holy month of Saga Dawa, and pilgrims will be gathering under Mount Kailas.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

In the restless nightthe village dogs howling from the rubbish heapsI have a dream whose memory fades on waking, leaving an aftermath of celebration, so that I try to re-enter it but can barely retrieve its last, faltering images. In the blackness of the room a sliver of dawn opens from the doorway. Dhabu the horse drover is going home. We crawl like caterpillars from our sleeping bags, and Ram cooks up a breakfast of chapati and eggs. Dhabu receives his wages with cupped hands, and is bright with thoughts of his village. This is in the mountains by Dharapuri, a few miles short of Simikot, and he will reach it in three days on a journey that has taken us a week. In his shy response to my farewell (in Iswor's lapidary translation) he is already homesick.

'My parents are there, and my wife. I want to get back to her, to see her again. She is my friend.' He nibbles at his chapati, as if he should not be with us.

'And your children?'

'I have four. Two died.'

I ask: 'How was that?'

'I don't know. One was five, another seven. I don't know why.'

Iswor says gently: 'He has no education, you see.'

'The nearest clinic is over the mountains, many miles away,' Dhabu says. He looks less sad than bemused, as if at some inexplicable order. 'My village is poor, peaceful. We own one field, which is not enough. So I work like this, with my horse Moti-moti...'

I wonder aloud how long he can sustain it.

'I will finish when the journey of my life is over, that is when I will end.'

I touch his hand, wondering how many peoples conceive life as a journey, time as a road.

But he says: 'I am happy. My life is good.'

I say laughing: 'You have a happy face.' It is long and humorous (although he does not smile), framed in bats' ears and a tent of rumpled hair.