A lean figure at the hill's foot turns out to be Ram, who has wandered here alone. He is gazing at the monastery in puzzlement or unease, so that I wonder what faith he follows. But he says: 'My people know nothing of religion. They are very poor.' His English comes shy and halting. 'They hardly know if they are Hindus or Buddhists. In my village it is all mixed.'

'You have no temple?'

'There is one lama started try to build a temple. He covered half of walls with tanka tankas, then no more money...'

His village is remote, he says, somewhere east of Everest, and his parents are old, his mother sixty-seven, his father sixty-two. 'My father is sick, with pains around his chest. But my mother very strong. They grow some barley and vegetables in exchange for rice. That is what we have.' He smiles hardily. 'And I have a little girl...'

'And your wife?'

'My wife is twenty-five.'

I say, half-laughing, as if to hide indelicacy: 'There is time for more children.'

But he answers gravely: 'No. We don't want more. We think one is enough. In Nepal families grow big, and it becomes hard to eat.'

Fleetingly I wonder at this unexpectedness: Iswor who will not marry until forty, Ram who does not want a son. The wind is stretching the prayer flags above us, the sun dipping. I say: 'Are you going into the monastery?'

But he only answers: 'There is nothing I want ask for,' and turns back.

A rough path winds among the prayer-hung crags and fissures. I climb into a courtyard and a temple hall where a novice is chanting. A century ago the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, examining the frescoes in Trugo monastery nearby, identified the muralled G.o.d of the lake, riding a pink horse, and the fish G.o.d rearing from the waves to greet him, his head gushing snakes and his body tapering to a dolphin's tail. But everything I see is newno fresco has escaped the Red Guardsand the novice breaks off his prayer to usher me away and point out another path. It slides close under the crags. The lake below is darkening towards dusk, but Kailas is rising clear beyond it, and light clouds sailing above.

A monk emerges on the path in front of me, and waits. He is whiskered and frail, his face battered to teak by the wind. He opens a tin-bound gate labelled '2', which almost falls from its hinges. Beyond it a double doorstartlingly richshines vermilion in the rock. Its leaves are bossed in bra.s.s and dripping with scarves. Beyond it, a now-familiar dark descends. I can barely see my way. The ceiling of the deepening cave falls close and soot-blackened. Lamps gutter in pools of isolated fire. Deep in his niche I can discern the gold glimmer of Padmasambhava, his hands clasping a thunderbolt.

This is his cave. It is believed that here, with his consort Yeshe Tsogyal beside him, Tibet's greatest saint pa.s.sed the last seven days of his life in sacred trance. Then he 'took rainbow body', leaving behind only his hair and fingernailsand his faithful widow, who settled down to pen his biography. Beside me the old monk is murmuring and glaring half-blindly into my eyes, but I cannot understand him. Once he gestures at a statue enshrined in the niche beside the saint and whispers: 'Yeshe Tsogyal!' But I make out only a shape painted dusty blue or grey, out of whose swathing pearls taper mandarin fingernails touched in blessing.

In this deepest recess of the cave, where the light has shrunk to a glimmer, the rock shape of a giant's footprint is hanging from the wall. Darkened by smoke and veneration, its stone glints faintly through the soil of pious hands. It seems to be dangling free from a ceremonial ribbon. But when I touch it, I realise it is an outcrop of the cave wall itself: shaped like a huge sandal. The monk has forgotten me, and is chanting at it with bewondered eyes. Padmasambhava, it seems, left such imprints all over Tibet, as if out of a sacred earth the stone recognised him.

He descends in a history florid with legend. In the eighth century, perhaps, he came from the Swat valley in today's Pakistan, where Buddhism already lay in ruins. In Tibet too, the older, Bon religion had regained the land, and Buddhism was fading. But popular histories are replete with Padmasambhava's miracles. Piously his life parallels the Buddha's. Born from a lotus, he is the adoptive son of a north Indian king, and attains enlightenment in exile, haunting the cremation grounds dear to tantric yogis. In Tibet he is tutored by the dakini dakini sky-dancers. He traverses the mountains converting kings, war G.o.ds and devils alike. Twice he escapes immolation on pyres by turning them to water or sesame oil, appearing in the flames enthroned on a calm lake. The outsize hand-and footprints of his pa.s.sing cover the land. An emanation, at last, of the Amitabha Buddha, he becomes immortal in death, and in a crescendo of attribution he leaves behind prescient treasure texts and writes the Book of the Dead. sky-dancers. He traverses the mountains converting kings, war G.o.ds and devils alike. Twice he escapes immolation on pyres by turning them to water or sesame oil, appearing in the flames enthroned on a calm lake. The outsize hand-and footprints of his pa.s.sing cover the land. An emanation, at last, of the Amitabha Buddha, he becomes immortal in death, and in a crescendo of attribution he leaves behind prescient treasure texts and writes the Book of the Dead.

The sect of Nyingma, the Ancient Ones, whose monastery I had visited at Yalbang, hail him as a second Buddha. It is he, they say, who retrieved the country's lost knowledge, and they who most rigorously guard it.

But as the histories grow earlier, so Padmasambhava fades. It seems he may stand in for a whole crowd of Indian yogis who reached Tibet around the eighth century. The monastery of Chiu, where I crouch beneath his sandal print, may be less than three centuries old. And in the earliest record of all, the saint dwindles to an itinerant water-diviner, who converted n.o.body.

None of this, of course, troubles the Kagyu monks who inhabit Chiu, any more than dubious saints disturb the Christian faithful. Slowly the old man leads me out of the cave where Padmasambhava meditated, or did not, and I put money on its altar. It is hard to know, from his aged face and tortoise movements, or from his brethren chanting in the temple, how wise or indolent these monks are.

For foreigners this has always been so. Long before the Chinese invasion, travellers recorded monasteries dulled by apathy and rote-learning. Over a century ago the j.a.panese monk Kawaguchi recoiled from their immorality (the scriptures were even used as lavatory paper, he said), and Swami Pranavananda, who visited some fifty monasteries over many years, mentioned only two lamas whom he esteemed.

But as the old man gazes at me, whispering and smiling, I long to know what he is saying. Western fantasies about Tibet's secret wisdom surface unbidden into my mind. His words rasp and fade. I stare hopelessly back at him. Is something important lurking behind those simple-seeming eyes? I question him in halting Mandarin, but he speaks none. I search for signs of use in the dusty tiers of scripturethe Kangyur and Tengyuron the temple shelves; but they seem to be kept less for study than for veneration.

The tin door rattles shut behind me, and the monk is gone. The dusk is cold and clear. Below me I see the half-lit channel of Ganga Chu, carved by the golden fish as it made for Rakshas Tal. Its intermittent flow depends on the will of the serpent king, of course; it brings about the mystic intercourse of the lakesor failsand its fluctuation tells the future of Tibet. For thirty years after the Chinese invasion the channel was saline or bone dry. Now it oozes again beneath me in slow shallows out of Manasarovar, trickling to where Rakshas Tal lies palely to the west, but never arriving. Near its bed, the outlandish bubbling of hot springs has become a pilgrim bathhouse. But the channel's waters barely tremble. Brackish and uncertain, they idle unconsummated to the foot of a low dam.

This periodic flow was the bane of explorers hunting for the headwaters of the Indian rivers. Even now the source of the Sutlej, the giant tributary of the Indus, is variously placed here or at the rivulets seeping from the slopes south-west of Kailas. To Hindus especially such waters rise by divine intent, and in the ancient Puranas the four world rivers find their birthplace on the mystic slopes of Mount Meru. The holy Ganges itself descends from the sky, flowing through the locks of Shiva, or circles Brahma's heavenly city before splitting into four and flooding down from Meru to mankind.

By a freak of geography, which knit Kailas indissolubly to Meru, the four chief rivers of the Indian subcontinent rise within seventy miles of its summit. The Karnali, the highest source of the Ganges, has drifted to the west of us now, to find its birth beyond Rakshas Tal. Tibetans, who gave the rivers sonorous names, call it Magcha-Khambab, 'the River that flows from the Peac.o.c.k's Mouth', while the Sutlej is Langchan-Khambab and flows from 'the Elephant's Mouth'. The Indus, the lion-mouth river, rises from scattered sources on the north flank of the Kailas ma.s.sif itself, and the horse-mouth Brahmaputra in an obscure glacier a few miles to the east. These two t.i.tans then diverge along almost 2,000 miles each to clamp the whole Indian sub continent in stupendous pincers. In their course they crash through the Himalaya in fearful gorgesthe Brahmaputra falls through the deepest canyon on earththen ease south into vast, slumbering estuaries. The Indus descends the length of modern Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, its waters still cloudy with the silt of Tibet and the Karakoram; the Brahmaputra spills into the Bay of Bengal after mingling with the Ganges among the mangroves and crocodiles of the world's widest delta.

The origin of these rivers baffled explorers for centuries. Ironically the first European to reach Kailas, the Jesuit Desideri, evaluated them more accurately than anyone who followed him for a century and a half (although he misplaced the source of the Ganges). Even the a.s.siduous William Moorcroft was deceived by the vanishing channel of Ganga Chu.

But the explorer who bestrode the whole region was the remorselessly driven Sven Hedin. At once impelled and flawed by a l.u.s.t for adulation, he cast himself in the mould of a sublime hero. He allowed nothingnot official prohibition, sub-zero temperatures nor the death of men and beaststo divert his course. In 1907 he reached Manasarovar from the east after an illicit journey that filled in 65,000 square miles on the blank map of Tibet. Within a few weeks all but six of his hundred pack mules and ponies had perished. When at last he caught sight of the blue sheen of Manasarovar, he burst into tears. He spent a month on its sh.o.r.es in an investigative frenzy. To the dismay of the Tibetans, he a.s.sembled a c.o.c.klesh.e.l.l boat and launched on to the water. The G.o.d of the lake would pull him under, they said. They believed that at its centre Manasarovar bulged into a transparent dome, and that even if Hedin mounted it he would capsize in the waterfall beyond. Instead, he took soundings on both Manasarovar and Rakshas Tal, cruising for hours. He imagined himself the first to sail here. He knew nothing of the Scotsman whose debut in a rubber dinghy had caused the death of the local governor fifty years before.

When at last he returned to Europe, trumpeting his discovery of India's river sources, and of the mountains he named Trans-Himalaya, Hedin received a mauling from the society that had once most ardently supported him, the world's premier body of geographers, the Royal Geographic Society in London. He defended his claims with magisterial arrogance, and partial success. But only his siting of the Indus source proved indisputable (the Brahmaputra had been located by a jaunty British hunting party forty years before), and his mountains were redefined as a broken and nebulous ma.s.sif unworthy of a Himalayan name.

In the cold British gaze Hedin had undermined his own achievements by exalting them. He retired to Stockholm, bruised and furious. He publicly supported Kaiser Wilhelm through the First World War, and Adolf Hitler in the Second, losing the love of his Swedish compatriots. He secured the release of several concentration camp victims, yet remained unrepentant of his n.a.z.i sympathies. His fame darkened, and faded, and he died in near-obscurity in 1952, bequeathing his research to his estranged countrymen.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

At night, the silence of the lake is p.r.i.c.ked only by the faint cries of water birds in their sleep. The sky is white with stars, and with the waxing moon of Saga Dawa, the Buddhist holy month, which frosts our scattered camp. Hindus say the shooting stars are sky G.o.ds who descend to bathe in Manasarovar. An Indian pilgrim tells me later that her night was disrupted by flashing lights and strange cries.

Towards dawn I wake breathless to a world turned crimson. From one horizon to another the lake is a long slash of fire, and the sky lightening with lurid strata of red and pale gold. Easy to imagine this an apocalyptic fracture in the order of things, a portent of sacred chaos, or at least a fanfare for the dawning holy month. I stand outside my tent, distracted by some dream I have forgotten. Far to the south, over Gurla Mandhata, the clouds are congealed black, as if it were a zone of clogged, perpetual night, and all along the sh.o.r.eline the grebes and sandpipers float or stand in the molten water, half of them still asleep.

The sky is paling to common day as I walk south along the littoral. Redshanks skitter about the sands, and the black-headed gulls fly back and forth and fuss in the shallows. Here and there the cliffs above me are pocked with caves. For centuries hermits have meditated around the lake, drawn to its lonely power. The whole region is riddled with their dwellings. I scramble up and find an entrance framed by rough-layered stones. Inside the cave is empty, but half ceilinged by timbers, and three votive scarves, quite new, hang on the rocks outside.

In the scarp above I glimpse a dwarfish doorway closed in plastered stones. A flurry of rock pigeons startles upwards as I clamber higher. The lake tilts and gleams below. A wafer-thin door swings in the cave entrance, once closed by a twist of wire that has dropped into the dust. As I edge it open, I feel suddenly uneasy. There are rumours of yogis still caverned round the lakenear Cherkip a solitary nun has only just left. I peer into half-darkness. I wonder momentarily if somebody has died here. By my hand a rusted stove is wedged deep in the cave wall, its chimney pipe wobbling up to a hole in the rock. But the cave is deserted. Its ceiling glints black like the vault of a coal mine. The smells are of dust, and the only noise is the sloshing of waves below. On a rock ledge deeper inside I come upon a bag of rice and another of salt, and a torch without a battery. Nearby lies a pouch of salinated earth, reverently gathered from the sh.o.r.es of the lake. Whoever was here, I realise, intended to return. But that, I think, was long ago.

The only clue hangs on a sheet of cardboard torn from a noodle carton propped against one wall. Some photographs of monks sag from its peeling sellotape, and beneath them dangles the notice of a 'heart return' ceremony in Nepal in the year 2000 for a Karmapa lama'Jamgon Kongtrul the Great'who had pa.s.sed into nirvana a century before.

So the hermit, perhaps, had belonged to the Kagyu sect, whose monks start meditating young, and which had once produced austere ascetics. I stare down from the cave entrance, imagining him climbing the cliff towards me, but the sh.o.r.e stretches empty. In such solitudes advanced yogis deepened their powers. And they were not precisely alone. Their discipline had been pa.s.sed down, teacher to pupil, in long lineages of arcane knowledge, and all around them abandoned caves blazed with the holiness of their predecessors. Their near-magic practice arrived from India as early as the eighth century, and it became the heart of Tibetan faith. Their path was called vajrayana vajrayana, the Thunderbolt or Diamond Vehicle, named from the hard swiftness with which it dispelled ignorance, and its scriptures were the esoteric texts named tantra. Its yogiswhether monk or laymanbecame a religious elite; but theirs was a dangerous and half-secret way. Within a single lifetimea shockingly brief span to conventional Buddhiststhe adept might overleap the toil of reincarnations and enter nirvana.

At times a belief that all experiencehowever mundane or immoralcould be channelled towards enlightenment licensed grotesque extremes. Matt-haired adepts haunted cremation grounds, pouring over themselves the dust of the dead, or sublimated taboos by orgiastic s.e.x, downing alcohol and slaughtering animals. The world, after all, was illusory. Nothing was of itself impure. They could seem like licentious criminals. The Moghul emperor Akbar, most tolerant of rulers, had his tantric yogis torn to bits by elephants.

But the cla.s.sic practicehowever disrupted by Chinese persecutioninvolves a lone and rigorous self-transformation. Guided by his guru, the novice selects a tutelary Buddha or divinitya yidam yidamand by an intense practice of identification achieves an imagined fusion with him. It is this divinity, often, who is portrayed with his consort in the s.e.xual union that the abbot of Yalbang had extolled: compa.s.sion joined with wisdom. Over months and years of rapt visualisation, the adept starts to a.s.similate to the yidam yidam, enthroned, perhaps, in his mandala palace. As his mind awakens, he experiences the mandala as real. Sometimes the G.o.d himself may be conjured to inhabit it. In time the yogi can summon or dissolve the picture at will. And slowly, at will, he becomes the G.o.d. Mentally he takes on his appearance, his language (in oft-repeated mantras) and even his mind. He experiences his own body as a microcosm of the secret body of the universe. The world becomes a mandala. Seated upright, in union with Meru-Kailas, his breathing regulates and stills. At last he feels his body thinning into illusion, he merges with the Buddha, and it is time to depart.

'The world disappears. This is our peace.'

In his temple courtyard in Kathmandu, the genial monk Tashi, who had studied tantra for three years now, refused to call it a philosophy, still less a faith. 'We have no G.o.d.'

The G.o.ds were only guides to the enlightenment that would erase them. His arms unfolded impotently from his chest, trying to explain. 'I think it is a science. Anyone can do it. I think you can do it.'

I tried to imagine this, but the wrong words swam into my mind: rejected life, self-hypnosis, the obliteration of loved difference. Premature death. But tantrism was a way to be lived, Tashi said, not a doctrine to be learnt. You could not know it until you experienced it. Though by then, perhaps, it would be too late to return.

He said: 'In this meditation you find above all great strength, and eventual peace, the peace we all seek. Once you start out, yes, you know it will be foolish to give up. You will lose too much...nothing would be left.'

Soon he would be going into retreat for three years, and he longed for this. 'I could travel to my village in Bhutan and find a hut, but my family would give me no peace.' He laughed. 'I'd ask them to visit me just once a month, and they wouldn't understand...' So he did not know where he would gothat depended on his teacherand in meditation it was this teacher he envisaged more than his yidam yidam, imagining the man a Buddha. 'That is how it is with us. Even if your teacher is a poor one, you revere him.'

From the temple beside us the throb of prayer and the thud of drums reverberated like a strong heart. Compared to the shaped tunes of Christian chant, this deep, rhythmic muttering was not prayer at all, but an unearthly emanation. Then came the groan of the ten-foot horns, as if a great beast was stirring underground.

Tashi said suddenly: 'If I could come with you to Kailas, I would want to stay there. In that sacred place. Always. In solitude.'

I wondered then if hermits survived on Kailas, but Tashi did not know. 'But you will go there,' he said, 'and it will be good. It will clarify your mind, give you power. You will dedicate your pilgrimage to those who have died...and they will accrue merit.'

'They will?' My voice sounded harsh, wary of false consolation. 'Can you help the dead?' Some long-surrendered faith in me recoiled. In my childhood, Anglicanism had offered no Ma.s.s for the dead, no intercession. The dead were beyond reach or comfort.

But for Tashi, the implacability of karma had been alleviated by kindlier traditions. 'Yes, dedicate good deeds to them. If you go on such a journey with nothing in your mind, it will be empty.'

Often he seemed very simple, very practical. He tolerated contradiction better than I did, I thought. Or perhaps, for him, nothing contradicted. Sometimes he scratched his head in amus.e.m.e.nt at somethinghis tonsure glossed it like a tight helmetand his fingernails made a noise like tearing paper. After a while two cows wandered into the courtyard from a nearby building site, and he went away to coax them back.

From the hermit's cave above Manasarovar a skein of geese flies silently at eye level eastwards. I climb down to the sh.o.r.e again, where Kailas rises cloudless to the north. Floating above the steel horizon of the lake, the mountain has guided generations of renunciates. Buddhists say its guardian is the furious Demchog, whose ice palace is its summit. He is portrayed as a raging demon, multi-armed and skull-crowned, brandishing trident and drum, his consort Phagmo twined fast about him. But this rampant sentinel terrifies only the ignorant. He is not an indigenous mountain G.o.d at all, but a tantric variant of Shiva, and his mandala, complete with sixty-two attendant G.o.ddesses, is Kailas itself. So the G.o.d fades into his own mountain, and the mountain owns him.

The shape of Kailasa near-perfect cone thrusting from the mistmay have attracted veneration in a time of primitive fertility worship, long before the Aryan invasions of 1500 BC BC. Later Hindu scriptures likened the peak to a tumescent p.e.n.i.s or an oozing breast. Yet the early Aryans feared its future G.o.d, Shiva, as the outcast lord of renegades and thieves. The first epicsthe Ramayana, the Mahabharataplace him only tentatively on Kailas, and celebrate Mount Meru as a separate, mystic country. The Himalaya then were divine territory, feared by mortal men, and few but ascetics dared penetrate them from the plains. But to follow the rivers to their source was to seek out holiness, and the rivers led to Kailas. Some time early in the second millennium, Shiva was enthroned here in a surge of Hindu piety. Mount Meru broke into the human world, converging with Kailas, and multiple paradises radiated over the slopes. Tiers of G.o.ds and spirits ascended the mountain in an ever more powerful elite. Its scarps flowered with jewels, herds of sacred elephants barged through its sandalwoods, and its air rang with celestials' song. On its lower planes the caves gleamed with the piety of hermits, and in fragrant forests the souls of the dead awaited rebirth. The mountain enfolded all extremes. From caverns beneath it, grim t.i.tans emerged to do battle with the G.o.ds, and the abyss of h.e.l.l yawned below.

Shiva, meditating on the mountain's summit, retains the shadow of his renegade past. He is the lord of havoc and regeneration, patron of mystics and wanderers. His face is smeared blue with the ash of the dead. He dances the world into being, and into ruin again. He brings both the hope and the desolation of change. Only the yogi can still this impermanence, who in trance imagines his body united with Meru-Kailas, and who activates its psychic energies until they float him into peace.

In early scripture Parvati, daughter of the mountain G.o.d Himalaya, seeks out Shiva and seduces him over thousands of years, by her ascetic devotions and immortal beauty. She becomes his shakti shakti, his energising genius, and their marriage on the mountaintop is the union of thought and untamed nature. But Parvati is as changeable as he. Sometimes she is called Urna, pure light. At others she is Kali, the terrible G.o.ddess whose sacrifices had drenched my feet at Dakshinkali.

Whoever its presiding divinity, the concept of a world mountain pervaded Asia. A shadowy etymology even links Meru to ancient Sumer and the ziggurats of Babylon. Hindu temples were planned to emulate the mountain's mystic layoutfor they too are the dwellings of G.o.ds. The great eighth-century Kailasa temple at Ellora, carved from living basalt, is a conscious mirror of Meru, as is the third-century BC BC Buddhist stupa at Sanchi. In the Shaivite sanctuaries of south India, especially, the roofs beetle skywards in multi-tiered mountains, and their ritual water tanks echo Manasarovar. In Tibet itself the chortens are miniature Merus, while the white triangle of Kailas is daubed on countless cottage doorways. In south-east Asia the Cambodian Khmer raised their ma.s.sive temples on the same patternAngkor Wat is a giant image of Meruand the Meru-shaped palaces of the Burmese kings helped to sanctify their tyranny. Buddhist stupa at Sanchi. In the Shaivite sanctuaries of south India, especially, the roofs beetle skywards in multi-tiered mountains, and their ritual water tanks echo Manasarovar. In Tibet itself the chortens are miniature Merus, while the white triangle of Kailas is daubed on countless cottage doorways. In south-east Asia the Cambodian Khmer raised their ma.s.sive temples on the same patternAngkor Wat is a giant image of Meruand the Meru-shaped palaces of the Burmese kings helped to sanctify their tyranny.

Two years after my father's death, while distracting my mother with a tour of Java, we reached the largest Buddhist monument in the world. Barely a century before, the temple mountain of Borobudur had lain among volcanic ash and jungle, but now it lifted its worn stones free in nine immense, sculptured terraces to a crowning spire. We circled its galleries in wonder, their carvings enigmatic to us. Its lower tiers seemed to portray earthly life and the legends of the Buddha, but as we ascended, the bas-reliefs turned unknown. We were straying up the flanks of a vast cosmic symbol. In its concentric ma.s.s, tiered purposively from earth to nirvana, lava or jungle had preserved its panels almost pure. You read them right to left, circling clockwise, as if up some delicate initiation. This was the universe in stone imagined by the eighth-century Sailendra dynasty, 'lords of the mountains'. Sometimes my mother paused, panting. I did not know then that in youth she had strained her heart. She never spoke of it. Perhaps she herself had forgotten. But now, in old age, its fibrillation was shortening her breath.

But she joked, in holiday mood, that we were ascending to enlightenment. On the top terrace we looked out on misted jungle, and her breathing stilled. Along these esplanades some seventy Buddhas sat in cages of latticed stone, gazing outwards. 'So this is nirvana...' She spoke as if inspecting somewhere fascinating but irrelevant. She might have asked (but did not) if nirvana held the tang of interesting troubles, or Dalmatians, or those she loved. Beneath us the jungle bloomed rich on volcanic earth. After a while she took my hand and asked to go down again.

The clarity of the air draws the figure closer than he is. I glimpse him, black and sharp-edgeda Hindu pilgrim, knee-deep in the lakeand see the glitter of water as he splashes his face. By the time I reach his headland he is gone. A sodden prayer book is lying on the sand, and in the waves floats a tiny votive sheaf tied with string, which I cannot touch.

Close by, sixty years ago, some of Mahatma Gandhi's ashes were scattered over the lake. Hindus more than Buddhists bathe in the icy water, drink it, carry it away. Its purifying powers deepen in their scriptures, until it washes away the sorrow of all mortal beings. To bathe in it is to be destined for Brahma's paradise; to drink it redeems the sins of a hundred lives.

Close to sh.o.r.e the water comes oddly warm to my touch. The Hindu Puranas ask that pilgrims here pour out a libation to the shades of their forefathers. This rite of tarpan tarpan, it is said, eases their souls into eternity.

As I wade a few yards into the shallows, they turn cold. I cup the water in my hands. I feel a momentary, bracing emptiness. But the tarpan' tarpan's truth is not mine. Its dead are changed into other incarnations, or faded in eternity.

In a celebrated pa.s.sage of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna addresses Arjuna the archer before battle: Thou hast mourned those who should not be mourned... Thou hast mourned those who should not be mourned... It is impossible, he implies, to terminally kill or die. People shed one life for another. It is impossible, he implies, to terminally kill or die. People shed one life for another.

Nor at any moment was I not,Nor thou, nor these kings.And not at all shall we ever come not to be...

So the two warriors pa.s.s into battle and hew down men with the exalted half-smile of Hindu G.o.ds. For they know they are killing nothing of importance. The erasure of the individual is the condition of salvation.

I still my feet in the cold water. I want to call out a name, but flinch from the expectation of silence. In these waters of Hindu consolation, people as I know them are extinguished. Like Borobudur, the lake is immense, primordially alien. I hug myself against an imaginary wind. A tightness opens in my stomach. I want to touch hands that I know have gone cold. The air feels thin.

Where are you? Among the graves of an English churchyardso many I don't knowmy breaking voice reminds me of someone else's. It is, of course, of yours. You exist now in the timbre of my voice.

The bar-headed geese are flying again along the sands, and seem uncertain where to go. Beyond them the white folds of Gurla Mandhata balloon over the water. Farmers in the lower Indus valley, watching the geese take the river pa.s.sage north to Manasarovar in spring, imagine they are heading for paradise. Perhaps these are the royal swans whose plumage, some say, turns to gold. Pilgrims are enjoined to worship them as Shiva, before pouring out water to the past.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

In 1715 the Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri, travelling from Kashmir towards Lhasa, pa.s.sed 'a mountain of excessive height and great circ.u.mference, always enveloped in cloud, covered with snow and ice, and most horrible, barren, steep and bitterly cold...The Tibetans walk devoutly round the base of the mountain, which takes several days, and they believe this will bring them great indulgences. Owing to the snow on this mountain, my eyes became so inflamed that I well nigh lost my sight.'

He was the first known Westerner to set eyes on Kailas, where he nearly saw nothing more. Few who came after him were not moved. Even to mundane eyes its beauty was tinged with strangeness. Its apparent cone is in fact a steep pyramid, and each side faces a cardinal compa.s.s point. To the excitement of geologists, its ma.s.s is not Himalayan gneiss but an ancient Tertiary gravel lifted on granite: the highest such deposit in the world. For Kailas is the lonely relic of an age still earlier than the Himalaya, and was once the highest island in the dwindling Tethys Sea. As summer advances, the melting snows on the south face break across its illusory stairway to sketch a shadowy swastika. This venerable symbolso corrupted in the Westrecurs as a sign of good fortune all through India and beyond. In Tibet it survives alongside its more ancient opposite (whose arms hook backwards), and on the flank of Kailas it flowers like a portent.

As our Land Cruiser crosses the Barga plain towards the base of the mountainin lumbering convoy with the British trekkersthere is no sign yet of any swastika, nor even of the lesion circling the mountain's foot, inflicted by demons trying to drag it away. All around us the foothills are scribbled with juniper scrub, and the plain is newly green, where herds of horses drift. From time to time we see hearthrugs moving over the slopes. With quaintly hunched shoulders and bushy culottes, these are yaks. In their darkly dripping coats they stand out like rocks against the bleached gra.s.s where they graze, and we plan to hire one to replace Dhabu and Pearl. Once too I glimpse a lone gorala Himalayan goat-antelopewandering across the plateau, delicate and pale, as if lost.

As we draw closer, the mountain's strangeness intensifies. The whole ma.s.sif to its east leans faintly towards it, flowing in brown waves to the white pyramid under a wash of blue sky. Slowly we are approaching the settlement of Darchen, where pilgrims hire beasts for the mountain circuit. Here, traditionally, is the start of the pilgrimage. A century ago Kawaguchi found it a cl.u.s.ter of thirty stone houses. A curious treaty a.s.signed its administration to the Maharaja of Bhutan, together with many local monasteries, but when a visiting British trade commissioner arrived in 1905, he found everybody drunk. Twenty-one years later his successor found everybody still drunk. Thirty years ago, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, the place was all but abandoned, emptied by persecution and winter storms. The only inhabitants were a deranged Tibetan couple who lived in the chapel of the decaying monastery.

From the military checkpoint that stops us short of it, Darchen looks ordered and compact. In twenty years it has become a town. But as we approach, it starts to fall apart. Its buildings separate down stony streets, which peter out uphill. We arrive at an open s.p.a.ce where a few alleys converge. It is strewn with trash and broken stones. A wavering line of shops is here, Chinese and Tibetan side by side, where I buy some beer then wander the town in dismay. I pa.s.s run-down guest houses, Chinese army compounds, a leftover monastery. A lifeline of prayer flags loops over a squalid gully to the foot of the mountain. Meanwhile our alien permits are scrutinised by police, who at last ratify them, but any attempt to hire yaks is doomed. It is the eve of Saga Dawa, when pilgrims converge on Kailas, and the region has run out of yaks. The town is uneasy. It is over a year since the pre-Olympics riots in Lhasa, but the Chinese distrust of gatherings is running high. Access to this remotest province is always hard, but police have constricted it further, for fear of a huge congregation under the mountain.

Yet the pilgrims are filtering in. They trail curiously about the shops, shadowed by their tousled children, their gear heaped on their backs. The men go anonymous in a.s.sorted caps and anoraks, and I cannot tell how far they have come. But the sheepskin chuba chubas of the women fall to their feet beneath ap.r.o.ns striped scarlet, green and oxblood red, and their hair hangs braided to the waist under scarves and little ear-flapped bonnets. When their faces are not masked against the dust, they are smiling.

A shopkeeper speaking mixed Mandarin and English tells me the town has grown more bitter. Three years ago, he says, a thirty-foot statue of Padmasambhava was raised on a nearby hill with the help of local monasteries. 'In fact we all gave money for it. I paid money myself.' He grimaces. 'Then they put a cord round its neck and pulled it down.' He whispers: 'The Chinese army, of course.'

Their tread is heavy. We are close to a border disputed with India, and the barracks sprawl. From time to time squads of soldiers wielding batons and riot shields stamp through the streets, their march an open threat yet faintly absurd, their arms bullying wide. Camp followers are here too. Sad, rough women emerge beside me wheedling amo amo, amo amo, so that I wonder for a moment if they speak Italian, then remember the Mandarin for ma.s.sage.

A huge wall of mani stones and whitewashed stupas marks where the pilgrimage begins, its parapets and towers festooned with flags and piled with yaks' skulls. Round this derelict-looking monument the circling devotees are mostly ancient, too frail for the kora, the mountain circuit itself. Instead they hail the holy month by this creeping ambulation, murmuring an Om mani padme hum Om mani padme hum with every bead that drips from their blackened fingers. Sometimes they chant longer prayers, distressed or musical, flattening their palms together in still graceful supplication, or twirl hand-held prayer wheels. In the stupas the apertures are clogged with tiny clay Buddhas left by votaries to guide the dead, and the yak skulls are heaped even on nearby ledges. Between the black horns the bone blazes with mantras steering the beasts to a better afterlife, or inscribed in penance for their deaths. with every bead that drips from their blackened fingers. Sometimes they chant longer prayers, distressed or musical, flattening their palms together in still graceful supplication, or twirl hand-held prayer wheels. In the stupas the apertures are clogged with tiny clay Buddhas left by votaries to guide the dead, and the yak skulls are heaped even on nearby ledges. Between the black horns the bone blazes with mantras steering the beasts to a better afterlife, or inscribed in penance for their deaths.

We skirt the slope beyond, Iswor and I, shaking the dust of Darchen from us. Kailas is out of sight, hidden by dark outcrops. On a track below, still travelled by Land Cruisers and army lorries, Ram and our tents have preceded us to where the pilgrims are gathering for Saga Dawa. On this first, desultory stretch of the kora not a soul is in sight. A dry wind is flailing the rocks. For a hundred yards a mani wall follows our path along the flank of the hills, its stones all canted at the mountain, unbroken. To the south float the snows of Gurla Mandhatawith the spectral peaks of Saipal and Api beyond in Nepaland flat-bottomed clouds are cruising the sky.

A single pilgrim appears marching far ahead of us, but faster than us, and vanishes. Once we come upon a rank of bronze prayer wheels turning in emptiness, and circle it happily. I had imagined such wheels contained paper leaves that fluttered loose when turned, but on this wind-hacked slope several have cracked open and I see insideguiltily, as if glimpsing intestinesthe pristine prayers coiled tight in cylindrical wads.

A stone flies into Iswor's eye. We bathe it from my water bottle beside the lonely prayer wheels. Tortoisesh.e.l.l b.u.t.terflies dither about us. Then we start again, tramping over dry gullies. The way is flagged by cairns of ivory-white stones cast up by the conglomerate mountain, cairns to which pilgrims add a pebble in pa.s.sing. By these we are gently ascending. We pa.s.s a stone pile more huge than normal. Then the poles of prayer flags, felled by the winds perhaps years ago, lie across our approach like a shattered stockade. Here at last, by a little plateau, Kailas swings clear of its own ma.s.sif. The black, toppling ziggurat of a hill still intervenes, but beyond this, out of its dun foothills, the white summit moves up like the cone of a rocket. Here we stand at the first chaksal gang chaksal gang of the kora, a platform for ritual prostration, facing the mountain. It is strewn with whatever anyone can carry up: inscribed stones, yak horns, articles of clothing. But the pilgrims have gone before us. It is so quiet that the loudest noise is the buzzing of bees among the fallen flags. This sacred wreckage of skulls, stones and garments looks organic with the rocks where it lies. I sit on a boulder, waiting for someone to come, but n.o.body does. Iswor stares at the emerging mountain, one hand over his eye. The pale horizons of the Barga plain have been squeezed from sight behind us. An hour later we are descending to the holy valley of the Lha river, which flanks Kailas west and north. The canyon walls climb dark and serrated along it, and the wind has fallen. of the kora, a platform for ritual prostration, facing the mountain. It is strewn with whatever anyone can carry up: inscribed stones, yak horns, articles of clothing. But the pilgrims have gone before us. It is so quiet that the loudest noise is the buzzing of bees among the fallen flags. This sacred wreckage of skulls, stones and garments looks organic with the rocks where it lies. I sit on a boulder, waiting for someone to come, but n.o.body does. Iswor stares at the emerging mountain, one hand over his eye. The pale horizons of the Barga plain have been squeezed from sight behind us. An hour later we are descending to the holy valley of the Lha river, which flanks Kailas west and north. The canyon walls climb dark and serrated along it, and the wind has fallen.

We come over a hill to an amphitheatre of worn gra.s.s. An espalier of linked flags surrounds it, converting the valley to a vast, open-ended oval of suspended and dripping colour. In the centre an eighty-foot polethree or four pine trees clamped end to endhovers stupendously aslant, waiting to be raised tomorrow, and around it the crowds are already processing clockwise, several hundred of them, chanting.

But an apprehension is in the air. The lorries of the Chinese police and army have penetrated along the valleythey are lined up opposite usand every twenty yards, in a cordon round the pole, a soldier is standing stolidly to attention. The police are sealing off an overhanging hillock, and the truncheon-wielding squads are tramping back and forth. But beyond the palisade of flags, the pilgrims camp oblivious among boulders, picnicking or praying. Traders have set up shop in tents, and a Chinese mobile clinic is processing people for swine flu.

The only building is a stone hut. Cramped into its dimness, seated at low tables, some twenty Kagyu monks are chanting and playing instruments. The noise is terrific. They are robed in a medley of crimson, maroon and mustard yellow, and they span all ages. The emblazoned hats of the senior monks taper up like cherry-red mitres, while the juniors' flare into pharaonic crowns that overhang their faces a foot above. They motion me to sit with them. Their tables are littered with b.u.t.ter lamps, bells, bottles of cola, and the stiff leaves of sutras. Aligned in worship, they form a genial gallery of whiskered age and callow youth. Mostly their hair is cropped or bound in pigtails, but sometimes their cheeks drizzle beards and wispy sideburns, and their locks fly free around spectacles glimmering in stranded orbs. I wonder if it was one of these Kagyupa who took refuge in the hermit's cave above Manasarovar, and rejoiced at the lama's 'heart return'.

Pilgrims crowd in, touching money to their foreheads before they leave it for the monks. A novice collects the notes in a box labelled Budweiser Budweiser, while another ducks among the chanting heads to serve them supperbowls of coagulated rice and radisheswhich they eat with jovial slurping while they pray. And all the time the unearthly music continues, with its voices like insects stirring, the horns braying their melancholy, the tap of a curved stick on an upright drum, and the watery explosion of cymbals.