He touches his features, as if confirming them. 'Good.'

I watch him depart, with Moti following. He turns back once and, from this distance, dares to lift his hand and smile. Iswor beside me says: 'That is a very simple man.'

Now that the horse is gone, we must use Tibetan transport on the far side to carry us to Taklakot, the region's traditional trading centre, and on to Kailas. But we cannot cross the frontier alone. Chinese suspicion brands the lone traveller here as maverick or spy. His solitude is otherwise inexplicable. Without a group he is too elusive, slips beyond control. But somewhere behind us marches the party of seven British trekkers under whose camouflage I hope to cross. They should be here by evening. Iswor carries a satellite phone by which he might have reached them, but he never turns it on.

We leave the hostel without regret, pitch our tents in rough ground among ruins in Hilsa's outskirts, and wait. The prospect of the trekkers touches me with foreboding. These past days I have felt a stressless self-diffusion, as if my own culture were growing lighter on my shoulders. I will not welcome its return in others. I have too much imagined these mountains as mine.

Iswor and I wander the derelict settlement alone. Only a few barley fields surround its no-man's-land, and every other structure is half-built or falling down. A desultory wind whips up the dust. The inhabitants all seem transient, here to exploit the border trade. No one was born in Hilsa. Yet the place is built on a sediment of Chinese waste: Pepsi-Cola cans and split trainers, cigarette cartons, Lhasa beer bottles, old tins of engine oil. Women and children digging foundations burrow among stones and trash together. Everyone is swathed anonymous against the dust. But for the first time in days I set eyes on a wheeled machine: a little Chinese tractor that must have driven over the bridge or through the water. There is even a wonky wheelbarrow.

We stop beside the bridge. On the far side stands the clean stem of a Chinese electricity pylonthere is no electricity in Hilsaand we hear the growl of earth-moving where the tarmac road is descending to the river. Iswor says quaintly: 'I am sad for looking.'

'What is it?'

'The Chinese...We do not have their future. We are not a developing people like them.' He keeps his back turned on Hilsa, frowning, as if its hovels parodied his life. 'Perhaps this place is forgot by us. Kathmandu is far from here. Even Simikot is far.'

Weeks later, when I visited Iswor's village birthplace high in the hills above Kathmandu valley, I understood a little. Circled by far mountains, its terraced maize and vegetables, cherry and peach trees touched it with an illusion of self-sufficiency. A small Hindu temple and a Buddhist stupa rested side by side. Doors and lintels showed old carving, and dark overlapping roof tiles turned the houses to ancient and precious reptiles nesting in the orchards.

Iswor's parents had migrated to Kathmandu in his childhood, but returned to the village for leisure and to manage their few fields. But his eldest brother Bishu was a celebrity. Iswor languished in his shadow. Bishu had climbed Everest with an Indian army team, and was dubbed a 'summiteer'. His job in a Kathmandu travel agency was well-paid, and he owned two houses and some land. When he visited from the city, the young men's hands clasped together in hero-worship, and the old hurried to greet him. Walking one day in the June-scented pine woods above the village, he told me: 'Iswor's job is not so frequent, not so rich. I don't know what will happen to him. Maybe he will come back here and do farming...'

But Iswor didn't want to farm. He wanted to succeed in the cruel labyrinth of Kathmandu. 'The young are bored in the village,' he said. 'It's only two hours by motorbike from the city, so they go in and get jobs as clerks, drivers, anything.'

'And what happens to the villages?'

He said what I already know: that they become the ghetto of the unenterprising, the sick, the old. It was the same all over Asia. Sometimes the villages were sustained by women. Often they fell to absentee landlords. On their picturesque hillsides they started to go silent.

But you would not have guessed this that night. The young men danced and sang on a hillside by the blaze of a log fire: old Hindu songs, Iswor said, which they had learnt in childhood. A man with Down's syndromehis Mongoloid features subsumed among the Tamang faces round himgyrated alone in his dirty smock, frenzied by the music. Far into the night the youths went on singing and tapping their damphu damphu drums, and if an invisible divide existed between those who had returned from the city on holiday and those who had greeted them, it was blurred by allegiances deeper than success, and by the old remembered music under the village stars. drums, and if an invisible divide existed between those who had returned from the city on holiday and those who had greeted them, it was blurred by allegiances deeper than success, and by the old remembered music under the village stars.

The women kept away or watched shyly from the dark. The older wore bright saris. But no, Iswor said, he could not marry one, and repeated his refrain: 'They have no education.'

Only one girl gentled his voice when he spoke of her: his thirteen-year-old youngest sister, back in Kathmandu. 'I love her. I want to help her continue at school, even if my parents don't afford it. Her oldest sister will leave the home soon, and then she will be alone.' He grimaced into the dying firelight. Just as he was to Bishu, perhaps, so the small girl was to her elder sister. He spoke as if she were an orphan, or a shadowy afterthought. 'She will be very sad...'

His poverty seemed only to exacerbate this brotherly dream. She alone, it appeared, had touched his complicated heart.

The seven British trekkers trickle in at evening, and pitch their tents by ours. They are not the hearty group I had feared, but middle-aged and quiet. They have come for scenic beauty and physical challenge. Most are experienced trekkers. Their leader prefers his groups older, he says. Often the young are less fit, and do not know their limits. Our transient union brings luxuries. We eat in a dining tent on rickety camp chairs. From time to time the wind rattles its poles loose and collapses some canvas on to us. n.o.body complains or expects much. We feast on dumplings and omelettes, and morning porridge. Their sherpas rig up a modest lavatory tent above an excavated hole.

At evening, as I linger with Iswor by the Hilsa bridge, where the Karnali now flows brown with dust, the goat and sheep herds come barging and bullying across it, aborting all human traffic, until a column of yaks displaces them and I cross for a moment into Tibet. On this bank, beneath a sagging barbed-wire fence, a low plinth is carved China China in Chinese characters on its far side, in Chinese characters on its far side, Nepal Nepal in Nepali on the other. But the flimsy gate is closed. I sit down on the plinthone leg in Nepal, the other in Tibetand gaze where we will go, with luck, tomorrow. in Nepali on the other. But the flimsy gate is closed. I sit down on the plinthone leg in Nepal, the other in Tibetand gaze where we will go, with luck, tomorrow.

But few Western travellers entered by this secretive Karnali. They came by more accessible pa.s.ses from India in the west. The first European to set eyes on Mount Kailas, the Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri, in 1715, had toiled there from Ladakh, sometimes snow-blind and coughing blood. Had he and his companion not fallen in with the caravan of a Tartar princess travelling to Lhasa, they would probably have died. Some six weeks later, in consternation, Desideri pa.s.sed beneath a bitterly cold and cloud-wrapped Kailas. For days on end, he wrote, pilgrims circled the foot of this dread peak, whose sanct.i.ty was deepened by a certain Urghien (Padmasambhava), the founder of their religion. Here, centuries ago, the saint had meditated in a cave now celebrated by a few monks in a wretched monastery.

For five astonishing years Desideri, a man of keen learning, preached among the Tibetans in mutual tolerance and curiosity. But in 1721 he was recalled to the Vatican. Bigotry and turmoil ensued, with Mongol invasion, and in 1745 the last missionaries were expelled from Tibet. As the years went on, the country's borders became encrusted with hopeful Christian outposts, longing to enter. When the land fell to Christ, some believed, the Last Day would dawn. But the Tibetans never allowed missions into the heart of their country again.

For a century after Desideri, no known European set eyes on Kailas. Then in 1812 the erratically brilliant veterinary surgeon William Moorcroft, with his shady companion Hyder Hea.r.s.ey, made their way here disguised as Hindu ascetics. Moorcroft, intent equally on exploration and pioneering commerce, purchased a herd of fifty pashmina goats to drive back into India, and combed the Manasarovar lake to discover if any of India's great rivers had its source there. Three years later he vanished into Central Asia, where his papers turned up piecemeal long afterwards, fomenting the mystery around his death.

The source of the great riversthe Ganges, Brahmaputra, Indus and Sutlejbecame an obsession in London and British India, and remained uncertain even into the early twentieth century. As if by divine intent, all four of them rose close to Mount Kailas, echoing 2,000-year-old Hindu scriptures. Yet by the mid-nineteenth century Tibet was being breached not by explorers but by army officers and civil servants on big-game hunting forays. Defying the ban by both British and Tibetan authorities, they slipped over the Zanskar pa.s.ses with their servants. On these illicit journeys the magnificent and controversial topography they were treading went largely unrecorded. They were more concerned with potting an Ovis ammon Ovis ammon or a wild yak, and they treated Tibetan law with cavalier disdain. One Scottish aristocrat even sailed a rubber dinghy on the sacred waters of Manasarovar, for which the local governor was beheaded. or a wild yak, and they treated Tibetan law with cavalier disdain. One Scottish aristocrat even sailed a rubber dinghy on the sacred waters of Manasarovar, for which the local governor was beheaded.

Yet Tibetan officials were often quaintly peaceful in their efforts to repel these foreigners. They complained that they themselves would be executed if they failed. One traveller reported a whole troop of soldiers who fell pathetically on their faces, drawing their hands across their throats in sign of their own fate. Even the bigoted Henry Savage Landor (grandson of the vile-tempered poet), who wrote a gaudy account of his ordeal, was only physically a.s.saulted after every other measure to turn him back had failed.

The true survey of Tibet at this time was achieved by Indian pandits, trained by the British and disguised as merchants or holy men. Their piously fingered rosaries were in fact recording distances, and their prayer wheels were stuffed with coded data. Even after the brutal British invasion of Tibet under Younghusband in 1904, travel for foreigners was no easier. In 1907 the Swedish explorer Sven Hedina man of self-blinding visionhad to enter by subterfuge. He then spent fifteen months following a thousand-mile broken arc of mountains eastwards across inner Tibet, and became the first European to reach the source of the Indusand to join the pilgrims circling Kailas.

Humbler travellers, of course, had been entering the country for centuries: pilgrims who left no record. In a land of bitter extremes, racked by armed dacoits riding hardy ponies and yaks, they were wretchedly vulnerable, protected only by their poverty. Some of the brigands were themselves on pilgrimage. Others routinely contributed a share of their plunder to the monasteries. The fastidious j.a.panese monk Ekai Kawaguchi, while circling Kailas, noticed a notorious bandit and murderer praying to the mountain in penance not only for his past crimes, but for those he expected to commit in the future.

Kawaguchi himself was one of the first and most perceptive pilgrims to recount his journey, in 1900. He was perhaps a spy; yet fervently pious. After surviving early vicissitudes (including a nomad girl's a.s.sault on his virginity), he prostrated himself a ritual 108 times on the first sight of Kailas, then broke into poetry and circled the holy mountain for four days in ecstasy.

But it was Hindu pilgrims who penned the most ardent journeys. Eighteen years after Kawaguchi, the swami Bhagwan Hamsa, a girlishly fragile figure, found his own salvation on Kailas. He too, in high-flown prose, survived countless perils on the way: cobras, ghosts, a l.u.s.t-crazed elephant, licentious mountain women. On Kailas he stumbled into the glacial cave of a yogi, with whom he spent three days, drinking only water, his head resting in the yogi's lap at night; and beside the frozen lake beyond the highest pa.s.s he received a vision of his personal, tantric saint, in whose presence he felt himself diffusing mystically away. The account of his journey later featured an enthusiastic preface by W.B.Yeats, whose poem Meru Meru described a world mountain where hermits, 'caverned in night under the drifted snow', might pa.s.s finally beyond illusion. described a world mountain where hermits, 'caverned in night under the drifted snow', might pa.s.s finally beyond illusion.

Tibet was still so little known that travellers could imagine it the haven of once-universal mysteries. Echoes of ancient Egypt were divined (some scholars still play with this idea), and the country was even rumoured the fountainhead of the Aryan people, so that Hitler's propagandists took a sentimental look at it. Tibet's present state might be wretched, but its past could be purified. Even the early Christian missionaries entertained fantasies, imagining themselves among a people of lapsed Christianity. The Dalai Lama, after all, enjoyed the veneration and infallibility of a pope (and was likewise mired in politics), protected not by the Holy Roman Emperor but by the Celestial Emperor of China. There were trinities of Buddhist deities. Tara, the G.o.ddess of compa.s.sion, recalled the Virgin. Protestant intellectuals later castigated Catholics and Buddhists together as idol-worshipping and relic-venerating, alike in their celibate monks, their ritual incense, sprinkled water and rosaries. Strangest of all, as if in mockery of the Eucharist, the oldest Tibetan sectsthe Bon and the Nyingmapreserved a 'life-consecration rite' in which the priest pa.s.ses a communal bowl of beer and flour pellets among the congregation.

This, perhaps, is a relic of the Nestorian Christianity that had penetrated deep into Central Asia by the sixth century. A thousand years later, Indian sadhus were returning from the north with unverifiable reports that Christian communities lived around Lake Manasarovar, and sparked hopes that somewhere deep in Asia the legendary kingdom of the Christian emperor Prester John survived.

Towards nightfall an old man falters across the Hilsa bridge. With fearful care a young monk, his son, guides his uncertain steps, enfolding his shoulders in one arm, clasping his elbow in the other, as he shepherds him over to Nepal. The bridge rasps and sways. The old man is grimly dignified, dressed in a jacket of embroidered Chinese silk with sheepskin tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. His gaze is set on the farther bank, where they find haven in a little walled rest house with rickety balconies.

Later a crowd gathers to stare up at the ridge to the south. Faintly I descry two wavering lines of bharal bharal, the rare blue mountain sheep. In the gloom I make out the shifting of their black-stockinged legs against the pale rock, and their backswept horns. Momentarily the young monk comes out too, to see what is happening. He speaks hesitant English. He escaped Tibet to India, he says, and is studying at Dehra Dun. He can never go backhe plucks his orange robes as explanationbut every year his father crosses the border into Humla for four days, and they meet in this no-man's-land, before parting again. Each year he wonders if the crossing of the bridge will be their last.

I remembered another monk I had met that spring. His monastery belonged to the Gelugpa, the sect of the Dalai Lama, and its terraced gardens flowed vivid above the Kathmandu valley. He was slight and pale. I might have been walking beside a ghost. Cuckoos were sounding in the valley beneath us, but the Kathmandu suburbs were already lapping at the hill's foot, and the murmur of road-building rose from the mists. The monk was young, like the monk of Hilsa, and he too had been severed from his past by the Chinese frontier.

He said: 'My family came to Lhasa from our village in Tibet eleven years ago. My father had saved up some Chinese money. We were walking, without papers. I was ten years old. In Lhasa my father and mother gave me over to six others. Then they went back, and I never saw them again. Our group travelled over the plains secretly. Sometimes, I remember, I walked. It grew very hard. Sometimes somebody carried me on his shoulders. It was bitter cold, November. We walked for one month and ten days. I cannot remember how we slept. No relatives came with me. I have none here. Here I left them all behind and became a monk.'

'You wouldn't go back?'

'If I did, the Chinese would take me. I've demonstrated outside the Chinese emba.s.sy in Kathmandu, and they photograph you. They must have my face on their files, many times. On the border they recognise us by our Tibetan names.' A gentle rain was falling, but he did not notice. 'My mother is fifty-four now, my father dead. I have two sisters there. The youngest I can't remember. But I have spoken to my mother on the phone.'

'That's something.' But I thought: she will just be a voice to him until she dies. Had his parents, I wondered, been too poor to keep their late-born son, or had they purposely released him into freedom?

He only said: 'I don't know.' Behind us novice monks were running out of their cla.s.srooms, shouting and tussling together. 'My family is this monastery now. This is my place. My father, my mother, my brothers, they are all here.'

CHAPTER NINE.

I wake to the foraging of mules in the nearby rubbish, where they seem to be munching cardboard, and to a Nepalese police helicopter that lands beside the river in a spiral of dust. Etiquette demands that Nepalese porters carry our baggage across the bridge, and that Tibetan porters relieve them on the far side. The muddy water roars between. The straggling barbed-wire frontier is being breached by bands of goats that scramble over and squeeze through it. As we step through the open gate into Tibet, the sun is hot in a cloudless sky. No official is in sight. We sit on piles of rocks outside two tents for monitoring swine flu, and wait. wake to the foraging of mules in the nearby rubbish, where they seem to be munching cardboard, and to a Nepalese police helicopter that lands beside the river in a spiral of dust. Etiquette demands that Nepalese porters carry our baggage across the bridge, and that Tibetan porters relieve them on the far side. The muddy water roars between. The straggling barbed-wire frontier is being breached by bands of goats that scramble over and squeeze through it. As we step through the open gate into Tibet, the sun is hot in a cloudless sky. No official is in sight. We sit on piles of rocks outside two tents for monitoring swine flu, and wait.

As the hours drag by, my expectation starts to wane. Only the antic.i.p.ation of change has tempered the squalid rootlessness of Hilsa, but this is now seeping away. The sun scorches down. Beside us the Karnali runs dark with the blown dust of the night. I start to fear that the border is closing, as suddenly as it did last year during the riots before the Beijing Olympics. The jittery fiftieth anniversary of the Dalai Lama's flight has only just pa.s.sed.

By noon there is still no sight of police or medical orderlies. Then we hear that an Indian pilgrim has died on Kailas. They are bringing his body down. Sobered, we go on waiting. An Indian woman, arrived by helicopter the day before, sits with us on the rocks, her breast heaving. She has been to Kailas five times, she says, but her lungs are weak and she cannot climb much more. This last time she has brought her ex-husband with her: a silent man retracted behind dark gla.s.ses and a greying ma.s.s of beard. I sense she wants to teach him something.

A squad of porters trudges into sight, bearing the corpse on an old army stretcher. Three Indian elders walk alongside, but no one seems moved. The man, apparently, died alone. Other porters spread out one of the plastic canvases the Chinese use for baggage, and spray it with disinfectant, while a group of Tibetan women squat nearby, arranging each other's hair. Casually the body is tipped on to the canvas, the face covered by a brown cloth. A plump hand dangles loose, its wrist circled by a golden watch. One of the Indians produces a roll of sticking-tape and the porters entwine the corpse until it is half sitting up, while a gang of road workers lumber to and fro and the Tibetan girls go on primping their hair. Then the body is carried away across the bridge.

The Indian woman says sourly that this happens often. Her government runs small tour groups whose members are chosen by lottery. They enter Tibet through the northern province of Uttarakhand, acclimatising slowly, and are medically checked for fitness. Many are refused.

'But the private tour agents are different,' she says. 'They often make no medical checks at all. They'll enrol anyone. They just want the money.' Her gaze moves bitterly to the far bank, where the cortege is stumbling towards the helicopter. 'The people who sign up don't know how hard it will be. Kailas is holy to Lord Shiva, and many pilgrims are Shaivites from the south, from lowland cities like Bangalore and Mumbai. They've never climbed anything except their own stairs. Sometimes they're old.' She glances towards her ex-husband, who looks angry. 'We've come up too fast ourselvestwelve thousand feet in a few hours.'

Three medical orderlies with police and immigration officers arrive together. They are all Chinese, and scrupulously polite. We are lined up outside their tent, exhausted by the sunI stand with the trekking groupand called in one by one to fill out quaint health questionnaires. Are you carrying live animal other than dog and cat?...Have you had close connection with pig during one week?... Are you carrying live animal other than dog and cat?...Have you had close connection with pig during one week?... They take our temperatures from thermometers thrust under our armpits. Their smiles are clipped. Perhaps the rough warmth of native life around them has steeled this prim correct.i.tude. They are part of China's gift to Tibet, after all: health, education, infrastructure. They are uniting the motherland. In these life-threatening heights they work among an ungrateful people. Before they came, they've been told, the country was a sink of feudal serfs, with a life expectation of thirty-six, and its people are still insanitary, drunk, illiterate. They surely need to be taught. The orderlies have smart black briefcases, where the data on our health is filed away. They take our temperatures from thermometers thrust under our armpits. Their smiles are clipped. Perhaps the rough warmth of native life around them has steeled this prim correct.i.tude. They are part of China's gift to Tibet, after all: health, education, infrastructure. They are uniting the motherland. In these life-threatening heights they work among an ungrateful people. Before they came, they've been told, the country was a sink of feudal serfs, with a life expectation of thirty-six, and its people are still insanitary, drunk, illiterate. They surely need to be taught. The orderlies have smart black briefcases, where the data on our health is filed away.

The police too are reticent, even as they empty our backpacks. Their olive uniforms and crimson shoulder flashes look chaste and vaguely unnerving in the surrounding squalor. As the detritus of the past days is spilled out ignominiously on to a benchold socks, notes, medicine, thermal underwear, trinkets for childrenI grow anxious for my densely scribbled diary. A rosy-cheeked captain goes through item by item wearing surgical gloves. But he can barely read English, let alone the ant-like trickle of my handwriting. Only the pamphlet from a Buddhist monastery arrests him, with its photographs of monks. He is hunting for pictures of the Dalai Lama, whose face spreads paranoia along the whole frontier. His fingers fidget along the leaflet's portraits of old, smiling faces: Lama Zopa Rinpoche...Lama Lhundrup...Once he consults with another officer, and together they scrutinise the picture of an altar where a tiny snapshot is propped. Photo of a photo, can it be he? Impossible to be sure. It's merely a smile under a pair of spectacles.

A wolf in monks' clothing, the Chinese call him. But to Tibetans he is the incarnation of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compa.s.sion. His religious devotions occupy four hours of his day. Yet he rejects the mystification of his person and his image as the spirit of Tibet. He is a man, and transient. His apostleship of peace has brought his country a refracted holiness, but no Chinese concession. The West fetes and wonders at him. As for China, his distrust of material inst.i.tutions, even of his own office, renders him all but incomprehensible.

But the leaflet of smiling monks is at last returned to me, and an hour later we reach the waiting Land Cruisers, where a Tibetan guide drapes us with the white scarves of his people's welcome, and we start up the half-metalled road towards Taklakot. Behind us the ebbing waves of the Himalaya hang the sky with spires, while ahead the land smoothes into an ancient silence. In this thinned air everything inessential has been burnt away. We are crossing a wind-scorched tableland under a vacant sky. Its treeless hills roll caramel brown to the horizon. No one else is on the road. We pa.s.s two police posts and a ruined fort, and traverse some depleted tributaries of the Karnali. The ochre walls of the Khojarnath monastery fade behind us. Since last year's pre-Olympics riots, the Chinese distrust of monks has deepened, and we are forbidden to enter.

Fifteen miles later we are driving into Taklakot. I look out in bafflement on wide, half-empty streets. They are almost silent. This is Tibet, I tell myself, I am in Tibet. But the town has a lunar placelessness. A millennium ago it was the capital of an independent Tibetan kingdom, and in time its soft cliff caves were home to monks and merchants. It became the crossroads of Indian pilgrims and Nepalese traders bargaining rice, palm sugar and half the artefacts of the lowlands; of the local Drokpa Tibetans exchanging their immemorial wool and salt; of Khampa nomads selling brick tea.

But now the town has the gutted feel of other Chinese frontier places. In the modern districta cross-hatch of arid avenuesthe vanguard of a new civilisation is dourly in place: China Post, the Agricultural Bank of China, China Mobile. Here the Tibetan shops, with their whitewashed facades and roof lines of compacted twigs, go side by side with Chinese restaurants and hair salons, but none seems to be doing business. Their cavernous interiors are barely lit, and several look abandoned. Soldiers in fatigues and plimsolls are waiting outside the Li Fei nightclubfor this is a garrison townand police cars are nosing out of the lanes.

We arrive at a sterile compound where travellers are insulated in dormitories and stark bedrooms. Its gates are plastered with warnings against swine flu. We might have slipped back to the time before Deng Xiaoping, when foreigners and Chineselet alone Tibetanswere segregated. Our baggage is emptied again, and our permits in this sensitive area are scrutinised once more by the military. They have grown more nervous, more oppressive, since the riots last year.

I walk out into the chill of evening. Somewhere beyond these streets, above the unseen river, the ancient market district spreads under cliffs, and I grope there by compa.s.s, losing myself in the dead ends of alleys, crumbling walls, concrete barracks. At last a few willow trees clear a view. Below me drops the ravine of the Karnali, where the putty-soft cliffs, jagged and split by melt.w.a.ter, are riddled with caves that are still inhabited. At their feet the white stucco of Tibetan houses, sliced by tapering doors and high, barred windows, appears magically complete. I cross light-hearted over the suspension bridge and wait for the bazaarshectic with Indian, Humla and Tibetan interchange, trussed clouds of wool, hillocks of rock saltto break furiously around me.

But I enter a ghost town. A few doorways are still gay with murals, but most stand derelict, their rooms gutted beyond, their windows blocked, the tin pelmets swinging broken from their lintels. As I ascend the street past range after range of these phantom shops, a cold wind gets up from the west. Scarcely a soul is about. Here and there, as in some surreal dream, a rotted billiards table stands upended in the dust.

I ask a group of Tibetan women what has happened, but their Mandarin is worse than mine. The summer market has not worked for two years, they say, banned by the Chinese. They gesture back at the district behind me. Everything has been transferred to the modern zone. They smile in resignation.

A mani wall, the height of a man, wavers to the street's end. Thousands of inscribed stones, the colour of dull rose, are laid one upon another, topped by rose-painted yak skulls. The wall protects nothing, of course, and keeps out no one. It is an act of ma.s.s devotion, to be circled praying (although it is deserted) and its immured prayer wheels piously spun.

Beyond it the white walls of Tsegu Gompa, 'the Nine-Storeyed Monastery', emerge from a cliffside pocked with windows and gaping doorways. Galleries beetle over the scarp on sagging piers, but their stairways are cut deep inside the cliff, so that the ochre-splashed balconies disappear and re-emerge across the rock face as in a dilapidated palace.

I climb shivering through the courtyard gates, and call up to no one I can see. Only a ceremonial pole rises from the court. After a long time a shaven head peers down from above, then withdraws. I shout up that I'd like to enter, but nothing happens. I wait bleakly in the dying light. I wonder: will all monasteries exclude me like this? On the balconies the prayer wheel bells tinkle faintly in the wind. Cautiously the head reappears, vanishes again. Then a door opens in the cliff. The monk looks young and frightened. He speaks nothing I understand. He leads me by other doors along a pa.s.sage sliced into the scarp, then steeply upwards through a cave by an iron ladder in near darkness. One after another, I am groping through a series of airless sanctuaries whose ceilings lour black with lamp smoke, their crevices stuck with Chinese bank notes. In the dimness the walls drip with sacred banners, many faded and rotting, and behind them, perhaps precious in these thirteenth-century shrines, the wall paintings lie so obscure under grime that I can make out nothing.

In the central chapel the benches for praying monks, with the abbot's throne, are toy-like replicas of those in grander monasteries. But the young monk has grown nervously proud. He names the statues to mealthough most, in the version he gives, I do not know. They sit in cracked plaster, their blue and orange bodies clouded in yellow scarves. In this darkness they inhabit only pools of chance light, disclosing faces of gaudy indifference: cheap jewellery, bulging eyes, anemone lips. Sometimes a crowd of lamps trembles beneath an altar, although only the monk nurtures them. Here he points out the Sakyamuni Buddha, and here Padmasambhava, whose dead-white face trickles a black moustache, and whose androgynous consort flanks him in painted gold.

It is dusk as I cross back over the river to the compound to sleep. Behind me the riddled cliff face rises black above the valley, while far beyond it the once-great monastery of Shepeling lifts in ruins under the wakening stars. Sixty years ago this powerful hermitage sprawled along the ridge beside the fortress of the district governor, the 'Lord of Purang'. It housed some 170 monks, a school for novices, a vast library and 400 precious banner paintings. In 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese army artillery levelled it to dust, leaving only the roofless slivers and stubs dissolving into the night above me. A few monks, I later heard, had crept back to the ruins, but this desecrated skyline still loomed unrepented in the dark, like a warning to the divided town below.

In a land maimed since 1950 by Chinese occupation, by ma.s.s killings and displacement, the Cultural Revolution, with its wholesale destruction of all things old, struck at Tibet's heart. Amid the executions and 'struggle' sessions, all public vestiges of Buddhism were erased, the Buddha denounced as a reactionary, sacred images tossed into latrines, and scriptures converted into shoes for disgraced monks. By 1976, out of more than 6,000 monasteries and temples, thirteen remained.

How much material wealth must Beijing pour into the country before it can dream of seducing this profound Buddhist ident.i.ty? Where Tibetans sense spirit, the Chinese see superst.i.tion. When the Chinese demolished Shepeling monastery, they say, with its treasured scriptures and sixty-foot silken banners, they swept away the remnants of feudal sorcery, together with the skull from which the chief lama drank, and the enshrined t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e of an idolised warrior.

CHAPTER TEN.

A steep road takes our Land Cruisers north. Behind us the Great Himalaya cover the skyline, while ahead opens an orange and sulphur-coloured wilderness where the Karnali withers away. The 25,000-foot ma.s.sif of Gurla Mandhata, detached from the Himalaya in its own bright climate, comes shouldering down from the east, and my Tibetan driver, whose dashboard swings with the protective photos of lamas, starts softly to sing. steep road takes our Land Cruisers north. Behind us the Great Himalaya cover the skyline, while ahead opens an orange and sulphur-coloured wilderness where the Karnali withers away. The 25,000-foot ma.s.sif of Gurla Mandhata, detached from the Himalaya in its own bright climate, comes shouldering down from the east, and my Tibetan driver, whose dashboard swings with the protective photos of lamas, starts softly to sing.

Near the village of Toyo to our west the most formidable nineteenth-century invader of Tibet came to grief. The Indian general Zorawar Singh, marching in the service of a lightly federated Sikh empire, had already conquered Ladakh and Baltistan, establishing one of the borders of modern India, and in spring 1841 he advanced out of Kashmir with some 500 men, seizing forts as he went. Near Taklakot he routed an 8,000-strong Tibetan army, but fatally detached himself with a small contingent to escort his wife back to the safety of Ladakh. On his return, a Sino-Tibetan force cut him off near Toyo, and his detachment was annihilated.

Such were the legends surrounding him that only a golden bullet was said to have brought him down. His corpse was hacked into morsels to be hung up in local households, and even the hair of his body, which covered it 'like eagles' feathers', was plucked out for luck. Every four years, at the great monastery of Shepeling, his enshrined t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e featured in a rare tantric rite, until the artillery of the Cultural Revolution buried it. At Toyo a walled tomb once enclosed the general's filleted bones, but when Indian pilgrims visited in 1999 they found only rubble. Now the Tibetans have rea.s.sembled its stones into a rough chorten, looped with flags, where they still murmur mantras to the invader.

As we climb higher, the sky grows light and thin. The streams peeling off Gurla Mandhata spread small, spinach-green pastures before the wilderness returns. We pa.s.s a few road builders' camps, and a castle turning to dust. In less than an hour we have ascended 3,000 feet. Here and there a monastery stands in the wastes, and nomad flocks are grazing on nothing under the far mountains. Then at 16,000 feet, where the skyline is decked with cairns and flags, we crest the Thalladong pa.s.s and veer to a stupefied halt. We are gazing on a country of planetary strangeness. Beneath us, in a crescent of depthless silence, a huge lake curves empty out of sight. It is utterly still. In the plateau's barren smoothness it makes a hard purity, like some elemental carving, and its colour is almost shocking: a violent peac.o.c.k blue. There is no bird or wind-touched shrub to start a sound. And in the cleansed stillness high above, floating on foothills so faded that it seems isolated in the sky, shines the cone of Mount Kailas.

In this heart-stopping moment pilgrims burst into cries and prayer. Even our seasoned trekkers spill from their Land Cruisers to gaze. There seem no colours left in the world but this bare earth-brown, the snow's white, and the sheen of mirrored sky. Everything else has been distilled away. The south face of Kailas is fluted with the illusion of a long, vertical stairway, as if for spirits to climb by. It shines fifty miles away in unearthly solitude. Void of any life, the whole region might have survived from some sacred prehistory, shorn of human complication. We have entered holy land.

Yet the lake is only precariously sacred. It is called Rakshas Tal, the lake of demons, and is inhabited by carnivor-ous Hindu spirits. Only one monastery, demolished in the Cultural Revolution, has ever touched its sh.o.r.es. Pilgrims shun it. Its crescent is imagined darker and more brooding than the holy lake of Manasarovar nearby, whose circle reflects the sun. It is said to be tormented by winds and ice floes, and to lie above drowned mountains. Its waters were once a dark poison. But a golden fish, swimming by chance out of Manasarovar, carved a channel into Rakshas by which the sunlit lake flowed into the black one and redeemed it. So, to the initiate, the moon-waters of Rakshas Tal become the dark complementand psychic fulfilmentof Manasarovar.

We come down gently from the pa.s.s, and for a sterile moment the waters drop from sight. But minutes later another needle of bluedarker than the firstappears to our east, and we are descending to Manasarovar. As we pa.s.s a Hindu guest house, I feel a twinge of alarm that even in these solitudes this holiest of the world's lakessacred to one fifth of humankindmight have been polluted or built upon. Then it opens before us, untouched. Its waters yawn with the same fathomless intensity as Rakshas Tal, but the peac.o.c.k blue has deepened to a well of pure cobalt, edged by snow mountains that overlook it from one horizon to another. At over 15,000 feet it is the highest freshwater lake of its size on earth. Two hundred square miles of water shine in its chain of snows, so that the few pilgrims who circ.u.mambulate it must walk for fifty-four miles. No life disturbs its waters as we descend. Only here and there breezes plough the surface with tracks, as if invisible ships had pa.s.sed a minute before.

In fact no boat may sail here, and no one may fish its waters. There was a time when even hunting in this holy country was unknown. Visitors within living memory encountered bands of wild a.s.ses grazingI glimpsed only one, shy and far awayand marmots and hares would watch innocently close at hand. In the past half-century, this has changed. But even now, as we reach lake level, a skein of geese flies in on an eerie rush of wings, and water birds are strutting and nesting a stone's throw away from where we pitch camp, and speckle the sh.o.r.e for miles.

From here, if you stand among the birds, the whole lake stretches into view. At its southern end the shelving ridges of Gurla Mandhata ebb still snowlit even along the eastern sh.o.r.e, while at the other end, beyond waves of brown foothills, Kailas mushrooms into the blue. These two white summits haunt the lake. Between them its indigo void appears coldly primeval. Tibetans call it Tso Mapham, 'the Unrivalled', or Rinpoche, 'the Precious'. Its hushed stillness seems to freeze it in a jewel-like concentrate of water. In both Buddhist and Hindu scripture the universe is born from such primal matter. A cosmic wind beats the water into worlds, and the G.o.d Vishnu, who dreams in the ocean near-eternally, creates diversity out of oneness by a sheer feat of will. Geology itself heightens the lake's strangeness. For Manasarovar is a stranded fragment of the Tethys Sea, almost drained by the upthrust of the Himalaya.

To Hindus, especially, the lake is mystically wedded to the mountain, whose phallic dome is answered in the v.a.g.i.n.a of its dark waters. Already in the second century the epic Ramayana, describing the Tibetan plateau, sites Kailas beside a great lake, beyond which spreads unending night. Manasarovar, they say, was created by the mind of G.o.d. It is the flower of first consciousness. In a time before scripture, a band of seers came here to worship Shiva, the G.o.d of destruction and change, who meditates on Kailas. To empower their ablutions, Brahma, the primal lord of creation, engendered from his thought these astral waters. The lake became the nursery of the G.o.ds. Sometimes Shiva floats here as a golden swan. At its centre, unseen by common eyes, the king of the serpents and his people feast on the Tree of Life, whose fruit turns golden and drops to the waters, infusing them with immortality. By the sixth century, in the cla.s.sic Puranas, Manasarovar has become a full-blown paradise. From its roots in the serpent world below, the Tree over-spreads the sky, and the lake is alive with bathing celestials and seraphic music.

It was in these pure waters that the Buddha's mother bathed before receiving him into her womb; and here the serpent king taught enlightenment to his klu klu water spirits, as Hindu and Buddhist traditions seamlessly fused. When the Buddha and his 500 flying disciples surfed in on their way to Kailas, the serpent disposed them on golden thrones over the lake, where Hindu swans were already singing. water spirits, as Hindu and Buddhist traditions seamlessly fused. When the Buddha and his 500 flying disciples surfed in on their way to Kailas, the serpent disposed them on golden thrones over the lake, where Hindu swans were already singing.

These supernatural goings-on have left their trace along the sh.o.r.e. In the east it is streaked with curiously heavy pebbles, polished like gems. Behind us the pits abandoned in the slopes are the leftovers of gold prospectors, whose wounding of this sacred earth was punished by a plague of smallpox. It is said that a gold nugget shaped like a dog was dug up here a century ago, then returned to the earth in fear or piety. Holy lore has turned to magic all the lake's scanty life. Local people say that its herbs are sovereign against every disease, and when wave-battered fish are washed up dead on sh.o.r.e, the incense burned from them repels evil spirits. The lake's waters, drunk by the dying, usher the soul to paradise, and its sands inserted into a corpse's mouth prevent rebirth as an animal.

I walk like a pilgrim clockwise along the sh.o.r.e. The sun burns with a cleansing brilliance. The sands are grey and soft underfoot. At 15,000 feet the air feels light. My heart is beating harder, but my feet go numbly over the sand. The distances, in this clarified air, are greater than they seem. I make for a nearby headland, and two hours later I am still walking towards it. Objects look closer, but smaller, than they are. And solitary soundsa faint cheeping and pipingonly accentuate the silence. All along the waterline, between the lake's blank blue and the yellow land, coots and terns make a fringe of shifting life, tame in their borrowed sanct.i.ty. They never fly as I pa.s.s. Soon I am walking among whole colonies of water birds, as if invisible. Black-headed gulls mince in flocks along the sh.o.r.eline; sandpipers pace the shallows and redshanks needle the soft earth alongside. Just offsh.o.r.e, pairs of Brahminy ducks are washing their coppery plumage and calling to one another in a soft, domestic two-note, then converge chuckling. I am tempted to wade in a little, where the crested grebes sit moored on their twig rafts. At ten yards their dagger beaks and black-plumed heads, splashed with t.i.tian red, seem an arm's length away. Sometimes they dive suddenly, or call sadly at nothing.

As I round the headland a light wind rises, and miniature waves are breaking on the rocks. Just ahead, the promontory is heaped with white boulders that glisten unnaturally. In this dazzling air I feel oddly elated, unreal. Twenty miles away Gurla Mandhata silvers the water. At my feet slabs of stone have been prised upright and etched with prayers. What monks or pilgrims did this is impossible to know. The rock is chipped black around the words, which stand out in weathered ochre relief: Om mani padme hum Om mani padme hum, repeated like deep breathing. The slabs are canted mutely at the lake, or perhaps at Gurla Mandhata, home to the local rain G.o.ddess, and named from a legendary king who found salvation there.

High on the bluff above me ruined walls appear, and broken towers of loose-knit stones. I clamber up a slope of pure dust. There is nothing but wrecked rooms and the scent of artemisia. These, I realise, are the remains of Serkyi Cherkip, the Golden Bird monastery, where the Buddha and his disciples alighted to worship Kailas. It was gutted forty years ago in the Cultural Revolution. Until then eight small monasteries, roughly equidistant, had circled the lake like a mandala, each one symbolising a spoke of the Buddhist Wheel of Life. So pilgrims completing the lake's encirclement turned the wheel towards salvation. Six of these devastated monasteries have been restored, but they were never populous. At Cherkip, a century ago, the community had dwindled to a single monk. Morning and evening he rang its great bronze bell over the empty water, heard by no one.

It is Hindus who venerate the lake most deeply. Yet most of them gave up its parikrama parikramaits ritual circuitlong ago. Perhaps because Manasarovar was born from the mind of Brahma, whose paradise is transient, they rather seek their final deliverance in Kailas, the abode of Shiva, whose worship leads them through incarnations to eternal peace. But they still bathe fervently in the lake's shallows, which release them from the sins of past lives.

Beyond the ruins I come upon a hundred-foot-long mani wall, cresting the bluff above the lake. Its slatey stones are layered pell-mell on a base of rocks, some of their prayers elaborately inscribed. Even the Red Guards, it seems, despaired of destroying this interminable ma.s.s, and monks had rescued the stones years later, fractured and whole together, then gone away. Now the stones spread strangely through the silence. Their slate is blue-grey, grey-green, smoother than a blackboard. Under their broken voices the waves are falling heavier on the headland now, and the wind hardening.

As I reach the promontory of white boulders, I realise they are not rocks at all, but hillocks of gleaming ice. I touch their congested cold, astonished. The June sun blazes down, and they are hard as steel. They might have been cast up from another age. I have forgotten that as late as May the whole lake is a battlefield of colliding ice. In winter the water level drops beneath a frozen carapace that periodically collapses under its own weight. Then the tumult freezes again, until the surface has splintered into a turquoise geometry of six-foot ridges. On sh.o.r.e, wrote the Indian swami Pranavananda, who studied the lake in winter seventy years ago, blinding snowstorms bury flocks and herds together, and wild a.s.ses die on all fours beneath the drifts. In the lake shallows, hundreds of fish lie frozen in transparent ice, and even swans perish with their cygnets, sandwiched by fracturing floes. A few days before it melts, the lake explodes into roars and groans, mixed with sounds like human cries and musical instruments. The icy slabs and prisms clash and heave upwards, and the surface yawns with six-foot cracks. Close to sh.o.r.e, ice blocks as big as fifty cubic feet are hurled from the lake to land yards insh.o.r.e, still towering and erect, as on this worn headland, taller than I am, and mysteriously whole.

A mile from my camp, an isolated hill rises like a termites' nest. Its crags are disintegrating into scree, but around its crest the monastery of Chiu, 'the Little Bird', is plastered into clefts and caves, where its whitewashed chapels and cells look coeval with the rock. Stony paths and stairways meander about it, and strings of prayer flags, moored to cairns and boulders, billow from its summit like rigging in the wind.