To a Mountain in Tibet(8)

Ram and Iswor crouch alternately at my tent flap at sunrise, bringing lukewarm coffee, a bowl of shaving water, a breakfast of chapati and jam. They treat me with dutiful reserve. They wash in a freezing rivulet. Within half an hour the horse is laden with rope-lashed tents and ground-sheets and blackened kitchen ware, and we are moving into the dawn.

This is the hour of elation. You fancy you are walking into a pristine land. There is no sign, for a while, that it has ever been peopled. Your steps fall light. The trees chatter with birdsong and the river, invisible below, roars in its green chasms. It will be an hour, perhaps, before your body or mind habituates. You go as if dreaming. Rock pigeons are flitting between cliff crevices below, and the sun climbs warm behind you.

The terrain looks thin-covered, yet wherever the valley sides ease out of sheer rock, tremendous trees take hold. Firs and hundred-foot blue pines bank up with cypress and poplar in precipitous tiers, and weeping spruces thrust along the middle slopes. Soon we are among them, ascending in their shadow. As we toil up close to 10,000 feet, the heights that circle round us darken, crows croak from the pine tops and we are tramping among powder-grey boulders. A smiling woman passes by us, led by a youth. She is lovely, and mad, her ears hung with gold. They are gone before we can speak with them. The pines look diseased around us. They die upright, leafless and charred-looking, their stripped branches all intact, like ruined totem poles. A small village is here, whose terraces of buckwheat and potatoes shelve down to the river. Its people fell the pines for trade, and fill me with misgiving for these near-untouched forests.

We are entering the mountains as if following a jagged knife thrust. The smallest earth tremor, I feel, will snuff us out. Rather than making height, we are going deep. Whenever the valley walls part, the pinnacles of ice-bound mountains gleam beyond, and razor-sharp palisades, scarred with snow melt, stream up into powder-puff clouds. Such views grow hypnotic, especially, in the valley cleft ahead. I wait for any change in its parapets, any sign of a breach into Tibet. But they shift with the twisting river like stage scenery, as if conspiring in the old mystique of Tibet as an inaccessible otherworld.

I am travelling with this mystique myself, I know. It has grown out of childhood, and adolescent reading. This looking-glass Tibet is a realm of ancient learning lost to the rest of the world, ruled by a lineage of monks who are reincarnations of divinity. Recessed beyond the greatest mountain barrier on earth, in plateaux of cold purity, it floats in its own time. It is a land forbidden to intruders not by human agency but by some mystical interdiction. So it resonates like the memory of something lost, a survival from a purer time, less a country than a region in the mind. Perhaps it holds the keys to the afterlife.

The source of these imaginings is a complex one. The tiny handful of early European travellers to Tibet brought back contradictory records, portraying a land of faith and squalor, ruled by a lama elite at once oppressive and benign. Morality coexisted confusingly with idleness and rank superstition. As Tibet’s Buddhist isolation deepened into the nineteenth century, infected by Chinese xenophobia and an isolationist Nepal, Europeans could enter it only by subterfuge, often in disguise. The few who did so created a country–refracted through Victorian eyes–peopled by pious primitives steeped in magic and sexual depravity (polyandry was rife) and so perverse that the only wheels they permitted were those for generating prayer.

Then, towards the end of the century, just as European scholarship began to grapple with a more porous Tibet, a cloud of spiritual expectancy brewed up. It took bizarre forms. The notorious Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, claimed guidance from a lost Atlantean kingdom in Tibet–a brotherhood later exposed as nonexistent. Soon Tibet was rumoured a laboratory of occult miracles, where the paranormal was studied as a science. Its monks performed prodigies of telepathy and sonic power, moving rocks by their voices alone. Its yogis levitated and flew. Its statues spoke. The lung-pa, ‘wind men’, after extremes of meditation, could speed like ghosts across the landscape, barely touching the ground. And all through the land were hidden sacred and prophetic texts, buried by great masters centuries before, to be unearthed only when the time was ripe. The country’s mystique touched even Rudyard Kipling’s Kim; and when Conan Doyle was forced by public demand to resurrect Sherlock Holmes from the dead, he opted for Tibet as the country in which Holmes might temporarily but convincingly have disappeared.

The fantasy of Tibet as an exalted sanctuary continued far into the twentieth century, and has never quite stilled. The country’s religion, which Victorians had considered a distant and decadent deviation from the Buddha’s truth, was gradually hailed, on the contrary, as the refined pinnacle of a developed faith, and its scriptures as a treasure house embalmed by Tibet’s isolation. The sense of a miraculously preserved past was crucial to the myth. The country had a dreamlike quality, as if time had stopped. Travellers might feel themselves re-entering childhood, or an innocent and unruly unconscious. Others likened the voyage through Tibet, for all its mountain fastness, to a descent into the underworld, and the burgeoning popularity of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, variously translated, shed its strangeness even on my own journey.

As the West reeled in disillusion through two world wars, the last strictures on Tibet faded away. It became a site of pure human longing. The name Shangri-La had entered the language through the mythic Tibetan utopia of James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon, published in 1933, whose seers would redeem the world after its self-destruction. And something of this millennial yearning went on clinging to the country, shadowed by a foreboding at its fragility once it was exposed to the outer world.