It was this Red Hat sect, in the twelfth century, that instigated around Kailas the practice of sky burial. Perhaps, as some say, the Tibetans' is a death-haunted culture. Certainly their death cults haunt others. When I escape from the clamour of the monk-filled hut, I see before me, above the ground where the enormous pole will rise tomorrow, an empty plateau against the valley wall. On this Drachom Ngagye Durtro the sky burial of monks and nomads continues. The remorseless G.o.d Demchog, who dances out on Kailas the promise and terror of dissolution, imbues the Durtro with an ambivalent power. Like Shiva, whose ash-blue skin and skull garlands he shares, Demchog is lord of the charnel house, and his followers in the past have inhabited cremation grounds (they occasionally still do) to meditate on the impermanence of life and achieve the truth of emptiness. It is to such places, especially in this propitious month of Saga Dawa, that people may go to lie down and enact their own pa.s.sing. So the durtro durtros become sites of liberation. Rainbows link them to the eight holiest cremation grounds of India, whose power is mystically translated to Tibet.

A land of frozen earth, almost treeless, can barely absorb its dead. Holy law confines to burial only the plague-dead and the criminal: to seal them underground is to prevent their reincarnation and to eliminate their kind for ever. The corpses tipped into Tibet's rivers are those solely of the dest.i.tute. Embalmment is granted to the highest lamas alone, while the less grand are cremated and their ashes encased in stupas.

For the rest, the way is sky burial. For several days after clinical death, the soul still roams the body, which is treated tenderly, washed by monks in scented water and wrapped in a white shroud. A lama reads to it the Liberation by Hearing, known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by which the soul is steered towards a higher incarnation. An astrologer appoints the time of leaving. Then the corpse's back is broken and it is folded into a foetal bundle. Sometimes this sad packetsurprisingly smallis carried by a friend to the sky burial site, sometimes it is laid on a palanquin and preceded by a retinue of monks, the last man trailing a scarf behind him to signal to the dead the way they are going.

As the corpse approaches, the sky master blows his horn, and a fire of juniper twigs summons the vultures. The master and his rogyapa rogyapa corpse-dissectors then open the body from the back. They remove the organs, amputate the limbs and cut the flesh into small pieces, which they lay nearby. The bones are pulverised with a rock. The master mixes their dust with yak b.u.t.ter or corpse-dissectors then open the body from the back. They remove the organs, amputate the limbs and cut the flesh into small pieces, which they lay nearby. The bones are pulverised with a rock. The master mixes their dust with yak b.u.t.ter or tsampa, tsampa, roasted barley roasted barley, and then rolls it into b.a.l.l.s. Finally the skull too is smashed and becomes a morsel with its brains. One by one these are tossed on to a platformthe bones first, for they are the least appetisingand the vultures crowd in. and then rolls it into b.a.l.l.s. Finally the skull too is smashed and becomes a morsel with its brains. One by one these are tossed on to a platformthe bones first, for they are the least appetisingand the vultures crowd in.

These birds are sacred. On the burial platform above me they are thought to be emanations of white dakini dakinis, the peaceful sky-dancers who inhabit the place. Their fore-knowledge of a meal is uncanny. In his journals my father noted the mysterious speed with which they congregated, and speculated that they signalled to one another in flight by some system of their own. The submission of a corpse to them is the last charity of its owner, and lightens the karma of the dead. The birds themselves are never seen to pollute the earth. They defecate in the sky. Tibetans say that even in death they keep flying upwards until the sun and wind take them apart.

As I climb to the Durtro plateau, it shows no sign of life. A healing spring flows near its foot, and a white segment of Kailas shines above. My path winds up into light-blown dust. Beside me the cliff is the colour of old rose, scored by vertical cracks. The sun is dipping as the way levels into an aerial desolation. It is scattered with inchoate rocks, which may be those of rude memorials, makeshift altars, or of nothing. An icy wind is raking across it. The slabs for dissection are merely platforms, smoothed from the reddish stone and carved with mantras. People have left hair and clothing here, even teeth and fingernails, like hostages or a.s.sents to their death. I see a woman's silk waistcoat, and a child's toy. Some of the boulders are clumsily clothed. A folded stretcher lies abandoned. And now the wind is wrenching at all ephemera and bundling it awayfaded garments, old vulture feathers, tresses of hairto decay at last under rock shelves.

For a while I see n.o.body but an old couple wandering the perimeter. They move as if blind, huddled against the cold. Then I become aware of a man lying prostrate fifty yards away. As I look, he gets to his feet and hurls handfuls of tsampa tsampa into the wind, crying out. I make out a young face, circled in black locks. The wind stifles his words. He seems to be praying not to Kailashis back is turned to itbut to the cemetery itself. Perhaps he is addressing the into the wind, crying out. I make out a young face, circled in black locks. The wind stifles his words. He seems to be praying not to Kailashis back is turned to itbut to the cemetery itself. Perhaps he is addressing the dakini dakinis, but more likely he is invoking the gompo gompos, the Dark Lords who inhabit all cemeteries. The followers of these gompo gompos are the dregs of the spirit world: the hungry ghosts, the flesh-eaters, the rolang rolang undead. By the rite of undead. By the rite of chodpa chodpa the yogi invites them to devour his ego, hurrying him to salvation. And suddenly the man's the yogi invites them to devour his ego, hurrying him to salvation. And suddenly the man's tsampa tsampa has finished and he is rolling in the dust. His hair spins about him. He makes no sound. This is no pious grovel but a headlong rotation over the ground, inhaling the dead. Then he lies still. has finished and he is rolling in the dust. His hair spins about him. He makes no sound. This is no pious grovel but a headlong rotation over the ground, inhaling the dead. Then he lies still.

After he leaves, I go over to the terrace where he had been. Among the boulders I see two long, wide-bladed knives, then the ashes of a fire where a charred hacksaw lies. Then I come with alarm to the centre of the platform. A wooden board is there, scarred by blades. There are other knives, quite new, and an axe. They seem to have been discarded. And beneath the board, two bones are lying togetherthe arm bones of a humanwith dried blood and flesh still on them.

I walk away. I feel a wrenching revulsion, and a shamed excitement at the forbidden. I had heard that sky masters were artists of their kind, heirs to a strict profession. To leave one human piece uneaten will invite demons into the body: they will reanimate it as a rolang rolang, a living corpse, and steal its spirit.

But everything on the Durtro betrays crude carelessness. Perhaps its sky master has grown bitter. As with butchers and blacksmiths, the stench of uncleanness clings to these rogyapa rogyapas. Called 'black bones', they are shunned in their community. If one should eat in your home, his plate is thrown away. Their daughters rarely marry. Sometimes, too, their rules are transgressed. Tantric yogis even now, seeking stuff by which to brood on death, find human thigh bones for their trumpets, and skulls are offered them as ritual cups.

I cross the plateau in numb recoil. Only a belief in reincarnation might alleviate this bleak dismay. Without it, the once-incarnate dead become uniquely precious, and break the heart.

At sky burials the grief of relatives is said to disrupt the pa.s.sage of the soul, and sometimes none attend. Instead a monk is sent in advance to the cemetery, to ask its spirits to comfort the corpse as its body is dismembered. But generally the mourners come: it is important, they may think, to confront evanescence, and witness liberation. At some funerals, so onlookers claim, the mourners display no sorrow. They have learnt the lesson of impermanence, and look with equanimity at the pa.s.sing of the appearances they know.

But others say they lie on the ground, weeping.

Ram has pitched camp by the Lha river, where the humped tents of German and Austrian trekkersarrived overland from Lhasaseem suddenly a mult.i.tude beside us. Everybody is hunting for yaks or jhaboo jhaboos or ponies to carry their baggage, and perhaps themselves, around the mountain. But all these beasts are too few. And the kora confronts us with another 3,500-foot ascent, much of it steep. Iswor and I decide to jettison everything superfluous tomorrow and carry a single tent, with iron rations.

Late that night I wake to the soft, insistent ring of a mobile phone. I grope outside into the dark, listening for its source. But the nearest tent is out of earshot, and now there is no more sound. I wait, suddenly desolate. I feel sick at some imagined loneliness. Someone was trying to reach me, and I did not answer. Perhaps it is the hallucinatory shortage of oxygen, the starved brain, that summons this dream, and its incommensurate sadness.

I try to dispel it by walking. The Saga Dawa moon is full and shining on the river, and the sky dense with stars. In this thin air their constellations multiply and blur together like mist. The orange ones are probably long dead, their light arriving in posthumous and detached rays out of nowhere, while others are being born invisibly in the dark.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

The pilgrims circling the flagpole in the valley might be mimicking the greater kora of Kailas. They must ritually keep sacred objects on their right, so they orbit clockwise from early morning, in an aura of triumph. Viewed from the hillock where I stand, this seems an act not only of faith but of possession, as tigers mark out their territory at night, and I have the notion that Tibetans, by repeated holy circuitsof mountains, monasteries, templesare unconsciously reclaiming their sacred land.

Whether in the ritual of pilgrimage, the cycles of reincarnation or the revolution of the Buddhist Wheel, the circle is here the shape of the sacred. In folklore, G.o.ds, demons and even reptiles perform the kora. By this dignity of walking (and in Tibetan speech a human may be an 'erect goer' or 'the precious going one'), pilgrims acquire future merit and earthly happiness, and sometimes whole families pour round Kailas with their herds and dogsall sentient creatures will accrue meritafter travelling here for hundreds of miles.

As the morning wears on, the crowds thicken. A thousand pilgrims there may be, wheeling round the mast like planets round a sun. They go fast, buoyantly, as if on pious holiday. In this biting air the sheepskin coats still dangle from their shoulders in ground-trailing sleeves; the ear flaps fly free from women's bonnets, and the men's s.h.a.ggy or cowhand hats are tilted at any angle. Sometimes, in ragged age, the people prod their way forward with sticks, their prayer wheels spinning. Among them the tribal nomads march in a multi-coloured flood. All that the women have seems on display, and a playful courtship is in the air. Their belts are embossed silver and seamed with cowrie sh.e.l.ls, and sometimes dangle amulets or bells. They are bold and laughing. Necklaces of amber and coral cl.u.s.ter at their throats, their brows are crossed by turquoise-studded headbands and their waists gorgeously sashed. There are groups of local Dropka herdspeople, and hardy Khampas from the east, whose hair is twined with crimson cloth. And here and there gleam fantastical silk jacketspink, purple and gold, embroidered with dragons or flowers.

Ringed by Chinese soldiers, the flagpole stays monstrously aslant, dripping with prayer flags, waiting. The celebratory pennants fly everywhere, in colours too synthetic for the elements they symbolise, their yellow brighter than any earth, their green too vivid for water. Examining them, I recognise only Padmasambhava, stamped in woodblock, and the sacred wind horse, saddled with holy fire. On the outmost perimeter other prayers hang in faded waterfalls, printed on white cloth twice the height of a man. Bundled into diaphanous swags, they fall ma.s.sed and unreadable, like folded books. But every year they are a.s.sembled here, their draped forms fidgeting like ghosts in the wind, to bestow the protection of their sutras, the magic of words.

On a hillock above, the police scan the valley through binoculars, and officers are coordinating patrols through a walkie-talkie. Their telescopic video camera whirrs on a tripod, waiting to record troublemakers. The soldiers remain at attention in their cordon round the pole and other squadsswinging truncheons and riot shieldsswagger anticlockwise against the pilgrims or stand in units of five or six beyond the hanging prayers. But the Tibetans look straight through them, as if they had no meaning. All morning a helmeted Chinese fire officer stands alone and rigid, fulfilling some regulation, with a canister on either side of him and nothing flammable in sight.

The northern clouds have thinned away, and the tip of Kailas rises beyond the charnel ground. A few pilgrims are facing it now, lifting their joined hands to their foreheads. They call the mountain not the Sanskrit Kailas but Kang Rinpoche, 'the Precious One of Snow'. They may imagine on its crest the palace of Demchog, but even this Buddhist blessing cannot quite dispel a sense of ancient and impersonal sanct.i.ty, as if the mountain's power were inherently its own. This is the stuff of magic. In the eyes of the faithful its mana is intensified wondrously through all those who have meditated here, so that the kora is rife with their strength. A single mountain circuit, it is said, if walked in piety, will dispel the defilement of a lifetime, and bring requital for the murder of even a lama or a parent, while 108 such koras lift the pilgrim into Buddhahood.

These mathematics weigh the mountain's magic against the pilgrims' spirit. In the past the rich might pay a proxy to undertake the circuit, the virtue dividing between them; and even now, if a pilgrim rides a yak or pony, half the merit goes to the beast. Both yak and human are subject to earthly contamination, drib drib, which like a stain or shadow acc.u.mulates alongside outright sins. Pilgrimage cleanses these. The way of tantric meditation, which dismantles the illusions of difference, is only for the few, and those around me, slowed now to gaze at the raising of the pole, will rack up merit by an earthier journey tomorrow.

A century ago Sven Hedin, the first Westerner to complete the kora, wrote that its pilgrims' motives were simple. They hoped in a future life to be allowed to sit near Demchog; but they had other, more material concerns. Even now the remote workings of karma fade before the day-to-day. The pilgrim prays for disease to leave his cattle, for a higher price for his b.u.t.ter, for luck in s.e.x or gambling. She wants a radio, and a child. Such matters belong to the Buddhas and tutelary spirits of a place. In the lonely hermitages, the gompa gompas, around Kailas, they will offer the spirits incense to smell, a little rice to eat, a bowl of pure water. And somewhere in these wilds they may whisper to the fierce mountain G.o.ds to bring back the Dalai Lama to Lhasa, and drive the Chinese out.

A slight, saffron-clad figure stands before the flagpole. Tiny and quaint under a ta.s.selled crimson hat, he is the master of ceremonies, piping orders through a megaphone. Two hefty gangs, thirty strong each, start heaving on long ropes attached high up the mast, while a pair of lorries, their front b.u.mpers bound to it by cables, go slowly into reverse. A shout of expectation goes up, and paper prayers are hurled into the wind. The pole begins to lurch upwards. The rods that have supported it aslant drop away, and its strands of tethered prayer flags are dragged upwards in harlequin arcs. Then the pole judders to a stop, hanging at a forty-five-degree diagonal, like a gun barrel pointing at Kailas. The spectators are shouting in a tense half-chant, their hands clasped together. The master of ceremonies runs from side to side, guiding the rope gangs. If the pole does not slot bolt upright in its socket of stones, ill luck will befall Tibet for the coming year. For two decades until 1981 the ceremony was banned, while the country suffered. And now the guy ropes are taut and equal, the saffron figure shouts, and the pole glides upwards until all support is gone. The carnival streamers unfurl like petals around it, and the great tree stands miraculously upright, held only by these frail garlands of colour. The sky-blue silk at its summit, by design or chance, slips down to reveal the golden orb that crowns it, and the crowd bursts into triumphant cries of Lha-gyel-lo-so-so! Lha-so-so! Lha-so-so! Lha-gyel-lo-so-so! Lha-so-so! Lha-so-so! Victory to the G.o.ds! They shower fistfuls of Victory to the G.o.ds! They shower fistfuls of tsampa tsampa into the air, over and over, exploding it in pale clouds towards the mountain. They delve into bags br.i.m.m.i.n.g with prayer leaves, which soon become a snowstorm. A ceremonial oven, built of clay brick and stoked with yak dung and juniper, becomes a repository for more thrown prayers and incense sticks, until the air fills with a dense white blossom of benedictionscent, blown barley, paperthat falls round the boots of the Chinese soldiers, still impa.s.sively at attention, and floats on like mist towards Kailas. into the air, over and over, exploding it in pale clouds towards the mountain. They delve into bags br.i.m.m.i.n.g with prayer leaves, which soon become a snowstorm. A ceremonial oven, built of clay brick and stoked with yak dung and juniper, becomes a repository for more thrown prayers and incense sticks, until the air fills with a dense white blossom of benedictionscent, blown barley, paperthat falls round the boots of the Chinese soldiers, still impa.s.sively at attention, and floats on like mist towards Kailas.

At this moment something strange happens. High above, on the rim of the charnel ground, a white-robed figure raises a wooden cross. He descends towards us like a mystic Christ returning from Calvary, a tiny Buddhist monk fussing behind him, and vanishes into the crowds. But soon this enigma is lost among the pilgrims, who are revolving again like a great coloured wheel around the flag-fluttering tree, infectiously happy. Some reach its foot to touch their foreheads to its stem; others have thrown themselves on the stony earth, their arms stretched towards the mountain, palms joined. Even the police are photographing one another.

The monks, who have been praying in a seated line for hours, advance in a consecrating procession. Led by the abbot of Gyangdrak monastery from a valley under Kailas, they move in shambling pomp, puffing horns and conch sh.e.l.ls, clashing cymbals. Small and benign in his thin-rimmed spectacles, the abbot holds up sticks of smouldering incense, while behind him the saffron banners fall in tiers of folded silk, like softly collapsed paG.o.das. Behind these again the ten-foot horns, too heavy to be carried by one monk, move stertorously forward, their bell-flares attached by cords to the man in front. Other monks, shouldering big drums painted furiously with dragons, follow in a jostle of wizardish red hats, while a venerable elder brings up the rear, cradling a silver tray of utensils and a bottle of Pepsi-Cola.

But by late afternoon, with the ceremonies over, the wheeling crowds have thinned away. All round the perimeter they have looped the circling flags inwards to the pole, so that walking here you clamber through a jungle of vivid creepers, snagging underfoot or slung close above you. By dusk the pilgrims have dispersed to their camping grounds, and the place is silent. Now it seems to sag in brilliant ruin, like some game abandoned by children at evening. Its remembered rite carries with it, in spite of everything, a charge of innocent optimism, of earthy piety and trust. In the twilight a few campfires start up around the valley, and a faint perfume lingers: incense lit to feed the unhappy dead, and to please the darkening mountain.

Few beliefs are older than the notion that heaven and earth were once conjoined, and that G.o.ds and men moved up and down a celestial ladderor a rope or vineand mingled at ease. Some primeval disaster severed this conduit for ever, but it is remembered all through Asia and beyond in the devotion to ritual poles and ladders: the tree by which the Brahmin priest climbs to make sacrifice, the stairs that carry shamans to the sky, even the tent pole of Mongoloid herdsmen, the 'sky pillar' that becomes the focus of their worship. Such cults rise from a vast, archaic hinterland, from the world pillars of early Egypt and Babylon and the ascension mysteries of Mithras, to the heaven-reaching trees of ancient China and Germany, even to Jacob's angel-travelled ladder that ascended from the centre of the world.

These concepts, which spread in part from Mesopotamia, have in common that their life-giving stair or vine, by which sanct.i.ty replenishes the earth, exists at the world's heart, the axus mundi axus mundi; and in the sacred pole of Kailas, erected at the heart of the Hindu-Buddhist cosmos, they find a cla.s.sic exemplar. Its raising was a timeless ceremonyintermittently performedthat marked the Buddha's shallow victory over the Bon, the region's primal faith. For the Bon, Kailas was itself a sky ladder, linking Elysium to earth. The idea of a heaven-connecting rope is old in Tibetan belief, whose first kings descended from the sky by cords of light attached to their heads. By such ropes too it was thought the dead might climb to paradise.

Even in Buddhist myth there is something changing and fragile in the relationship between Kailas and its faithful. For all its ma.s.s, the mountain is light. In Tibetan folklore it flew here from another, unknown countrymany of Tibet's mountains flyand was staked in place by prayer banners and chains before devils could pull it underground. Then, to prevent the celestial G.o.ds from lifting it up and returning it to where it came from, the Buddha nailed it down with four of his footprints.

But now, they say, it is the age of Kaliyuga, of degeneration, and at any moment the mountain could fly away again.

The mystery of the white-clad figure with a cross is resolved at nightfall. I find him camped among the tents by the Lha river, his monstrous crucifix propped against a lorry. He turns out to be a Russian German, born in Kazakhstan, where Stalin deported his people during the Second World War. He stands gauntly tall, and talks as if delivering a holy ultimatum. Somehow he has blundered here across the complicated borders in his lorry, innocently confident.

I ask in amazement: 'You've had no trouble?'

'Everyone has been good to me. Everyone has welcomed me!' His blue eyes shine cloudless from a gush of ginger hair and beard.

'You're Russian Orthodox?'

'I'm an evangelist.'

His cross is covered with arcane images. A symbol of the world's mouth gapes on the headpiece; at its base a black sheep, signed with skull and crossbones, is pointing h.e.l.l-wards; while in the centre hangs the figure most puzzling to Tibetans: a crucified G.o.d.

The evangelist explains these symbols to me in a gruff litany, but I sense in him no expectation of my believing, and I wonder about his journey here, the incomprehension he has suffered. It is more than two centuries since any missionary preached in central Tibet. And now he launches into a credo so jumbled and esoteric that my remembered Russian fails. He has an idea that the people of Atlantis and the world will converge in Christ. 'And the earth's power lines run through the Sphinxeverybody knows thiswhich faces east towards Kailas, and Kailas...'

He goes on and on. His New Age cliches are bathed not only in Jesus but in an old Slavophile dream. The West is mired in materialism, but Russia is pure soul. Russia will be the saviour of the world...

'Even now, even under Putin?' I mumble.

'Yes, Putin, Medvedev, they are returning Russia to herself.'

He stands beside his cross, the prophet incarnate, the owner of truth. He craves the world's peace, a perfect ec.u.menism. If only people would listen. The Buddhists are all right, he says, but they have no Christ. He is bringing them the Russian Christ.

'But they don't understand me. They speak nothing.' It is his presence alone, with his towering cross, that must beam to others the redemption in his mind. How is his Christian trinity of G.o.ds received? I wonder. And G.o.d's son, walking in history? But he does not know. The generous Tibetan pantheon, I imagine, might superficially incorporate them. But they, together with the swarm of Buddhas and G.o.dlings, must vanish at last like a superst.i.tious mist before nirvana's absolute.

Would he go deeper into China? I ask. But somehow I do not fear for him.

'No. Kailas is my end.' He shakes his head: his hair makes a fiery halo. 'I will be going home now.'

'Where is home?' He is gazing up at the mountain and the charnel ground, and I wonder for a moment if he means to make an end there.

But he says: 'After perestroika my family came westwards, to Germany, where our people started.' So he was returning to the paradigm of Western materialism. 'Dusseldorf,' he murmurs.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

The true start of the kora is here, on the ridge between the great pole and the river, where the Kangri chorten isolates the mountain in its dark arch. The chorten's base is piled with stones placed by pilgrims before their leaving, and Iswor adds a pebble at dawn, then circles the site clockwise, the prayer beads loosened around his wrist, insuring against danger.

These chortens find their origins far back in the Indian stupas that enshrined the incinerated corpse of the Buddha. But in Tibet they have changed shape and taken other meanings. Some contain funerary remains, but most enfold scriptures and relics, often too damaged to be used but too sacred to destroy. Ours is a ceremonious gateway, purifying the pilgrims' path, and is built on a model now familiar, its square plinth mounting steps to a concave drum that ascends in turn to thirteen dwindling and compacted golden wheels, topped by a crescent moon cradling the sun.

These structures may be seen, predictably, in many ways. Their five chief components, from earthbound base to aerial sun, signify the Buddhist elements, as prayer flags do. But they double as the initiate's path to enlightenment, and a crowning disc on the sun's...o...b..trans.m.u.tes solar wisdom and lunar compa.s.sion into pure truth. Tantric initiates discover in the chorten an eidolon of the seated Buddha, and see its central axismost chortens enclose a vertical beamas a symbol of Meru-Kailas, or a male archetype infusing a female body.

We step through the chorten's pa.s.sage towards a vision of the mountain. Strings of yaks' teeth hang from the ceiling, brushing our shoulders, and two rotting yaks' heads dangle above. Enclosed in the drum above us, invisible relics confer benediction. Then we walk out into the holy valley. Its floor is lacquered green where yaks and jhaboo jhaboos are grazing. A few pilgrims are strung like beads along it. And here, around the meadows called the Golden Basin, the cliffs start to close magnificently in. Their bluffs break into seams of tangerine and pink, then shiver up like ruined towers to merge with the mountain walls, pouring down shale.

Beside us, hermit caves sprinkle the heights under the charnel ground, where pilgrims are climbing, wild-haired and young. Who had meditated here? Bonchung, perhaps, the early Bon wizard; or Milarepa, the Buddhist saint who dispossessed him? But they do not know. The caves are narrow, with platforms built of loose stones. Worshippers have glued money and prayer beads to the ceilings, and someone has laid her necklace on a stone.

We tramp along an easy path in high spirits. The Lha river wanders alongside, crusted with ice. Kailas looms in solitary snow to the north-east. Along the wide, pebbled valley ahead of us, a figure is inching forward, levelling its length in the dust, rising, advancing three paces, falling again, arms stretched ahead. Even when we draw alongside, I cannot at first tell if this is a youth or a girl. By these painful means, the body touching every span of the path, a pilgrim may circle the mountain in three weeks, returning each dawn to the spot abandoned, marked with a stone. When the figure rises, I see that it is protected in a leather ap.r.o.n; and the hands, which lift in prayer before each obeisance, are strapped with wooden boards. Out of the dust she turns a blackened face to me, and smiles. If she is initiate, she sees on the path in front her tutelary Buddha, and gathers virtue with every salutation. While two bent women, too old to perform this rite themselves, precede the near-child with a thermos of tea, crouching in the dust before her and willing her on.

Iswor tramps past, as bemused as I, and says only: 'Perhaps she has done something.'

We are entering a zone of such charged sanct.i.ty that any penance, or any crime, trembles with heightened force. Its few inhabitants, mostly monks, exist in a force field of intensified holiness, for their past incarnations have led them here. This domain is venerated even beyond Buddhists and Hindus. The surviving Bon worship their ancestral mountain here, circling it anticlockwise, and followers of the peaceful Jain faithalthough I cannot identify anyreverence Kailas as the site where their first prophet pa.s.sed away, and circ.u.mambulate it in the Buddhist way, carrying their prayer beads in little bags.

Pilgrims who complete thirteen circuits may walk the inner kora, a short, sometimes dangerous path that approaches the south face. But this is the closest anyone may go. Kailas has never been climbed. At 22,000 feet, it is not a giant by Himalayan standards, but it stands fearsomely solitary. In 1926, a British mountaineer, a Colonel Wilson of the Indian Army, with his sherpa Satan, reconnoitred the southern approaches to the peak, which Wilson likened jauntily to a bowler hat. After toiling up sunless defiles, he thought he identified a ridge that might reach the summit. But time was short. Aghast at the near-perpendicular scarp and the shaly abysses, the two men retreated, while a freakish storm of snow and lightning exploded over them.

It was almost twenty years before another British alpinist, Major Blakeney, fancifully imagined scaling the peak armed with little more than an umbrella; but his Tibetan guide adamantly refused. Then, in the mid-1980s, the great mountaineer Reinhold Messner planned its a.s.sault, while the Chinese temporised, and the matter petered out. n.o.body since then has attempted the summit. The north face is sheer, perhaps unclimbable, and racked by avalanches, the south and west precipitous with shale and glaciers. Only the east, barely visible on the kora, mayor may notoffer a less fearful climb. But the ascent of Kailas is still interdicted above all by a people who will not disturb their G.o.ds.

As we go north, these chasms are still out of sight, hidden by intervening cliffs, and even the granite plinth from which the summit rises is barely visible. In this valley where we gothe valley of Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Lightthe sandstone pales to fawn and amber and rushes up near-vertically in friable bluffs. As the valley narrows, the advance of the prehistoric glacier that carved out its moraine becomes grimly palpable. Tiny and high against one precipice, the first of the four hermitages that ring the mountain seems little more than a barn, built half-invisibly of the precipice stone. Prayer flags pour from its walls like celestial telegraph to the monstrous gully behind. It was from here, perhaps, that a boulder smashed the monastery five years before Hedin came.

We cross a low bridge downriver and struggle up towards Choku Gompa's walls. The crevices around are pocked with concealed caves, where Padmasambhava hid treasure texts, or Milarepa sat. As we go up, the cliff face across the river rears behind us, indented with seeming castles where a frozen waterfall hangs. Around us the earth is furred with white plants like salinated gra.s.s, and there are b.u.t.ter-yellow flowers among the boulders. Far below, the Lha river rushes green, and a train of yaks trickles across the gra.s.s-tinged valley floor. A mile away, the ant-like silhouette of Ram is moving north under his double load to a camping site we don't yet know; while to the south a black hyphen seems not to move at all, where the girl pilgrim is inching towards salvation.

Close by, the hermitage might be any age, although a television aerial and satellite dish stick above its roofs. In fact its thirteenth-century predecessor was levelled to the rocks by Red Guards, who destroyed every monastery around the mountain, and every chorten. By the time some Indian pilgrims reached Choku again in 1983, its ruins were attracting legends. It was said to have been vast, sheltering hundreds of travellers at night, and to have housed the arms of the near-mythic Zoravar Singh. In reality the gompa gompa had been small and unkempt, like this one. Kawaguchi found it quaintly subject to the ruler of Bhutan, with only four lamas living here. had been small and unkempt, like this one. Kawaguchi found it quaintly subject to the ruler of Bhutan, with only four lamas living here.

I discover its monks nested like swallows in little cells whose windows gaze on Kailas. Their lavatory encloses makeshift holes hanging fifty feet above the valley. There are three men only, who speak nothing I understand, and two rumbustious dogs wearing scarlet ruffs, for they too are holy. At the gates of the prayer hall pilgrims are sc.r.a.ping up its dust and stones into pouches. Inside, some 200 candles, each swimming in its cup of oil, draw down a curtain of fiery light. The fumes of yak b.u.t.ter that once reeked through Tibetan shrines have thinned awayreplaced by imported plant oilbut the money that pilgrims pay for replenishing the lamps is piled with fruit on the altar. Beyond the pillars the dimming ranks of saints and Buddhas people the shadows with their protection: the Buddhas of Past, Present and Future, the Buddha of Long Life cradling nectar, the Buddha of Wisdom wielding his flaming sword. Here too is the Avalokitesvara of compa.s.sion, whose thousand all-seeing arms halo him like a peac.o.c.k's tail, and the mother G.o.ddess Tara, born from his tears, whose great rock crowns the pa.s.s ahead tomorrow, the zenith of the pilgrimage, at 18,600 feet.

But the statue most enshrined in pilgrims' awe is barely discernible. Less than quarter lifesize, and so swagged in jewellery that no arm or even neck emerges, the white marble image of the Amitabha Buddha is the oldest and most precious of Kailas. Under its mandarin crown the pale face gazes, emptied of expression. Its eyes seem closed, its smile barely starting. It is said to be 'self-manifest', shaped by its own will from the stone, and to have flown here from its birthplace in the milky waters of an Indian lake. Encased beside it is the white conch sh.e.l.l blown by the saint Naropa a thousand years ago, and near the altar a huge cauldron of chased copper, floating with lights, is the pot where he brewed his tea.

These three relics are treasured as the body, mind and speech of the Buddha. In the seventeenth century the army of the pious king of neighbouring Guge carried them all away, but the statue grew so heavy that it could not be moved from the valley, the conch sh.e.l.l flew into the air, and the cauldron poured out blood, until the army retreated empty-handed. Soon afterwards the statue, lying among rocks, requested of an old man that he return it to Choku, and he carried it back, light as a cloud.

In the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, the old patronage of Bhutan may have saved the relics, but this is unsure. Already in the nineteenth century a Tibetan pilgrim reported the statue too damaged to a.s.sess, and the first cauldron was very likely melted down. In 1991 sixteen artefacts were stolen from the gompa gompa for the Western art market; and the conch sh.e.l.l, for all its embossed silver, looks spanking new. for the Western art market; and the conch sh.e.l.l, for all its embossed silver, looks spanking new.

A Tibetan pilgrim, who speaks cautious Mandarin, questions a cheery monk for me. All the relics are old, the monk says, and came here by magic. Sometimes the conch sh.e.l.l is taken to bereaved homes and sounded in the ear of the dead. 'It will light up their way! It will guide them. Sometimes the dead are brought up to the monastery for this.' He speaks with breathy cert.i.tude. 'The statue? It is self-made. In former times, it used to speak. It is the Buddha of learning and light. Students with difficulties have come here to learn and recite his mantra...'

But when I ask about Kangri Latsen, the monk turns cold. Latsen is the wild, autochthonous G.o.d of the heights to which Choku clings, converted to Buddhism, but older and darker, and kept separate, as if secret. But I badger a younger monk with the G.o.d's repeated name until he leads me down from the temple terrace through a storeroom and unlocks a door into the near-dark.

At first I can make out nothing. A single b.u.t.ter lamp is burning beneath a drift of white, and a slit window frames Kailas, but sheds no light. The room looks poor as an outhouse, its clay floors cracked. The monk is nervous, girlish. He waits near the door. I discern an altar of plain wood where the white silks hang, and some money thrown beneath. I step up to it. And out of the clouding scarves a red demon's face leers, straggled in red hair. It is glaring at the floor in eerie fixation, its teeth bared and eyes popping and inflamed. Of its body, if it has one, I can see nothing. But it wears a green crown, like a child's paper hat, and dangles a chunky amulet. The altar is flanked by two four-foot elephant tusks, and other faces are grinning from the silks beside it. Buddhists say that these ancient Bon wreckers have been converted to guardians of the faith, but this one seems to exist in angry exile, like a troubling unconscious, and all the gifts bestowed on him to no avail. It was this misanthrope, presumably, who chucked down a boulder on the monastery a century ago.

A group of Khampa pilgrims has crowded in after me, not knowing, I think, what will be here, but fervent to worship. Their women remain outside. The old men buy more scarves to heap beneath Kangri Latsen, beseeching in their grat.i.tude, stooped before the young monk, praying. I watch from the dark in fascinated estrangement, until they file away. Perhaps these raucous local G.o.dslords of the wind and the avalancheare easier to comprehend than the otherworldly Buddhas, and more prudent to propitiate on this hardest of all pilgrimages.

The Lha Chu, the River of the Spirits, guides us for five miles more along a corridor of paling sandstone. For 3,000 feet on either side its walls unfurl in towering curtains of pink and copper red. Some softness in the stone pulls it into fissured terraces that cut across the vertical cracks of the cliffs, until the whole rock face splinters to Cyclopean building blocks that travel unbroken for hundreds of yards. Then, high up, torn by wind, the strata thin and grow detached. They ascend to a filigree of turrets and palisades, pierced by the illusion of high-arched doors, until the skyline fills with wrecked palaces and temples. Where the rock turns sh.e.l.l pink, especially, these silhouettes seem to glow in another ether. In between, frozen waterfalls drop out of gullies, or tip over the cliff summits in flashes of ice. When these at last reach the valley at our feet, they melt into tributaries that barely flow, choking the Lha river with splinters.

The mountaintop palaces, of course, are the residencies of Buddha deities, and every oddity of crag or boulder becomes a sign of their habitation, or is the spontaneous self-shaping of some sacred prodigy. In the valley side facing Choku the monks descry sixteen saints cl.u.s.tered in rock, while on the summit floats the silk tent of Kangri Latsen. Beyond these, as we walk, a mystic stream carries down rainbow light from the mountain, and a rock cupola to the east is the fortress of the Hindu demon Ravana, converted to Buddhism, complete with his yak and his dog. The boulder that projects nearby is the crystal reliquary of the saint Nyo Lhanangpa, enclosing his vision of the Buddha, and beyond this the monkey G.o.d Hanuman kneels to offer incense to Kailas. Behind us to the east the tail of the wonderful horse of Gesar of Ling, Tibet's epic king, spills from the heights in an icy cascade, and his seven brothers inhabit seven rock pinnacles along our way. To the west, on three towering 20,000-foot peaks, dwell the three great bodhisattvas of longevity, and a granite boulder beside our track is a serpent-quelling Buddha made manifest. Everywhere, for those with sight, the stone throbs with life. And on Kailas itself gleam the glacial portals to the heart of Demchog's citadel.

In this complex topography Buddhist, Hindu and unregenerate Bon deities and spirits throng the path in overlapping regiments. There are literally thousands of them. Often I can locate a site only by some solitary pilgrim, prostrated where the hand or footprint of a Buddha has burnt like sulphur into the rock. Some of the G.o.ds and bodhisattvas fly confusingly between abodes. Others reside in several eyries at once. But always, in some sense, they are corporeal with their petrified dwellings, to which the pilgrim turns to pray. The great lama Gotsampa, searching for hearthstones on which to brew his tea, found none that he could use: for all the stones around him were the self-manifest images of Buddhas, or inscribed with their speech.

Wherever a cave scoops out a cliff and a hermit is remembered, feats of past piety soak into the rock, and the saints continue there in mystic body long after their death. The kora of every pious pilgrim adds its mite to this bank of invisible virtue, and the years-long meditation of a revered saintMilarepa, Padmasambhava, even the ousted Bonchungsaturates the mountain with its mana. Yet neither devoted ascetics nor conquering Buddha have quite eradicated a suspicion of darker G.o.ds. Most of these ancient troublemakers have been converted to meditation deities and protectors like Kangri Latsen, but sometimes their conversion looks shaky, and they backslide. Ranked in tiers up the slopes of Kailas, the lha lha sky G.o.ds fight the surrounding sky G.o.ds fight the surrounding lhamain lhamain (who are destined for h.e.l.l), and their pa.s.sions condemn them at last to bitter cycles of rebirth. The common demons that plague Tibetan livesthe (who are destined for h.e.l.l), and their pa.s.sions condemn them at last to bitter cycles of rebirth. The common demons that plague Tibetan livesthe sadak sadak 'lords of the earth', the black snakes of the 'lords of the earth', the black snakes of the klu klu lurking beneath the waters, the terrible armoured lurking beneath the waters, the terrible armoured tsen tsen on their flying red horseswither to Buddhist servants in the shadow of Kailas, but the mountain's capricious moodsits sudden storms and rock fallsstir countervailing fears and nervous rites of propitiation. on their flying red horseswither to Buddhist servants in the shadow of Kailas, but the mountain's capricious moodsits sudden storms and rock fallsstir countervailing fears and nervous rites of propitiation.

The pilgrims who pa.s.s us are few now. They go fast, intent and smiling. Many cover the hard, thirty-two-mile path in thirty-six hours; some will complete it in a single day. And hardship is of the essence. The kora ahead follows an intense trajectory of purification, mounting past sites for the ritual cleansing of sin to the fearsome pa.s.s, sacred to Tara, and its climax of redemption. Even these deep-lunged pilgrims may falter in exhaustion on the way. Meanwhile the pulse of the stone footprint under their anointing fingers, of their body p.r.o.ne against the ground, of the gaze of the mountain itself, generate a deep, sensory exchange. You gather empowered earth and pluck healing herbs. You sip divine water. Sin is cleaned like sweat from the body. Your prayers, too, are spoken aloud into the listening airI hear, but cannot distinguish themprayers inherited from family maybe, or the mantra murmured like breathing as you go. And at some time you utter the plea that your pilgrimage may aid the enlightenment of all sentient beings.

Behind me in the valley I am startled to see three men walking towards me counterclockwise. I imagine they are Bon, whose older faithful circ.u.mambulate this way, against the Buddhist stream, and I tentatively call a greeting. But they pa.s.s by with their faces retracted into hoods, averted, as if ashamed, leaving me mystified.

Before the Buddha came, and before Demchog, this was their mountain. Millennia ago, the Bonpo say, their founder Shenrab, sired by a cuckoo, alighted here from heaven, conquered the local demons, and gave the mountain to 360 G.o.ds named gekkos, reflecting the lunar cycle of the year. The chief, Gekko, for all his lizardish name, was a terrifying predecessor of Demchog and Shiva, with nine arms and blue-black skin, snorting out blizzards and thunder. His Kailas was a rock-crystal mountain, the earthly emanation of a celestial palace, which would survive the destruction of the world. If the Bonpo's universe was conceived as a tent, Kailas stood as its central pole, piercing the opening that illumined the sun and stars circling within, and the worlds beneath. To the Bonpo this 'Nine-Stacked Swastika Mountain' is inscribed with the emblem of fortune (rotating anticlockwise) and the footprints of their saints are all about it.

Buddhists contend that Bon is the leftover of a demon-ridden past. But the Bonpo claim that theirs is the primal faith, received from Persia, perhaps, or Central Asia, long before Buddhism. The historical Buddha, they concede, may be an incarnation of their own Shenrab. Their beliefs, in fact, go back to a time when the region around Kailas, the kingdom of Shang-shung, was the first, royal cradle of Tibetan culture. They were priests to the early kings and their practices were rife with sorcery, spirit control and the guidance of the dead. Yogis tower through Bon legends. They hang their clothes on sunbeams and turn into eagles. For at least two centuries this diffused faith fought with an incoming Buddhism and was slowly transformed by it, to re-emerge a thousand years ago as a religion whose tenets were often indistinguishable from the Buddha's.

Buddhism, in turn, imbibed many Bon G.o.ds and practices, including sacred dances and prayer flags. And both faiths, it seems, were influenced by the rites and spirits of nameless cults that preceded them. Tibetan Buddhists accept the 'white' Bon uneasily, whose temple statues are yet more savage than theirs, and whose embrace of magic is more wholesale. (The 'black' Bon remain an unmentionable fringe of shamanistic outcasts.) So the interfused faiths coexist, even in Lhasa's holy of holies. Right up to the Chinese invasion a Buddhist official would depart each year to a shrine near the Yarlung valley, cemetery of Tibet's kings, and there burn b.u.t.ter lamps and scatter grain in a plea to the cuckoo, the holy bird of the Bon, to fly back to Tibet.

He was an old man now, far into his eighties. He sat among cushions in a room high in the Kathmandu monastery he had founded: a simple cell, his bed folded nearby. A monk had placed a tiny cushion on the carpet before him, where I knelt. From the hill opposite, the noises of a Hindu templeoverrun by tourists, mangy monkeys and vermilion-daubed statueswere blurred to rumours in the sultry air.

Nothing in the Rinpoche's face, where the gentle eyes and still-dark eyebrows seemed touched in as afterthoughts, betrayed the long strain of travels fostering Bon communitieshe had become a holy figure to themor his year in a Chinese prison. In 1961 he had tried to escape Tibet with a group of lamas from his monastery, carrying sacred texts and relics.