The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (29 page)

Many dead pines interspersed the living in the forest. Barkless, they gleamed: ghosts among the green. For an hour or so I used them as path-markers or path-makers, walking between them. Silver and twisted, they resembled frozen columns of water, as if they had been poured from beneath the earth. As on the Broomway, I felt that I might be walking on the world’s underside and not on its surface.

That afternoon, when the sun was at its hottest and the flies at their most sedulous, I dropped a thousand feet off a ridge, down to where Miguel had told me I would find bathing pools in a river. It seemed impossible that there would be water here, but soon I heard its chortle and there was a blue stream, leaping its way between boulders. I followed it as it built in volume, and soon discovered a series of small deep pools. I stripped and bathed, hoo-ing and hah-ing at the water’s coldness, then lay on a flat riverside rock and let the heat run into me from the sun and the stone.

I spent that night in a dense part of the forest, surrounded by an untuned orchestra of crickets. At sunset the day’s light came amber and slantwise through the pines, and I saw millions of particles of pollen ticking down through it, gilded by the light, a steady shower of tree dust that settled on my skin and set the air seething.

‘
As I watch
[the world],’ wrote Nan Shepherd in 1945, ‘it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles.’ It is a brilliant observation about observation. Shepherd knew that ‘landscape’ is not something to be viewed and appraised from a distance, as if it were a panel in a frieze or a canvas in a frame. It is not the passive object of our gaze, but rather a volatile participant – a fellow subject which arches and bristles at us, bristles into us. Landscape is still often understood as a noun connoting fixity, scenery, an immobile painterly decorum.
*
I prefer to think of the word as a noun containing a hidden verb: landscape scapes, it is dynamic and commotion causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident. I prefer to take ‘landscape’ as a collective term for the temperature and pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil and building, the sounds (cricket screech, bird cry, wind through trees), the scents (pine resin, hot stone, crushed thyme) and the uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the
bristling
presence of a particular place at a particular moment.

Later that night, from the deeper shadows of the pine forest, two pairs of animal eyes glowed orange and green.

I woke powdered in pollen. The sky above the mesa was blue-brown. From dawn it was down on switchbacks through the pines for several hours, then out into open ground and scrub. ‘Santiago: 587 KM’ read one of the signposts I passed, marked with the scallop-shell motif of the Camino. Too far for me.

At a turn in the path I found a great brown feather a foot and a half long, with sticky spots of blood on its
quill
. It was from either the tail or wing of a vulture. When I picked it up it weighed almost nothing: an inverse echo of Dilworth’s dolerite and whalebone sculpture. The upper vanes were rough and the brown of a monk’s habit, but near the quill the vanes became a tousled white down, each strand so delicate that I couldn’t feel them brush my fingers.

I approached Segovia across baking plains, dust puffing up with every footfall, dust in the mouth, dust in the eyes. Red kites with notched tails turned watchfully overhead. Segovia has long since sprawled from its medieval walls, and to its south there are warehouse complexes and a glinting new rail terminal. Yet it still seems to sail upon the flatlands that surround it, as Ely does upon the Fens, and as I neared the city it felt like an allegorical journey: to have crossed a pine-forested mountain range on a series of ancient paths, sleeping out by the wayside, under a vulture-filled sky, and then to be entering on foot a walled medieval city seen first from a mountain summit, levitating from the baking plains.

The cathedral was still my guide and sighting mark, though now I could also see the pinnacles of the Alcázar, the castle that clings to the northern edge of the old city. I passed elderly Spanish men, shirtless in the noon heat. One man, who wore braces over his bare brown belly, asked me if I was walking to Santiago. I said I’d come over the mountains from Madrid and Cercedilla, and was walking on north-west, but was unlikely to reach Santiago. He nodded his approval, and walked companionably but silently alongside me for a while, before turning off, nudging a swing-gate open with his hip, and stepping into a cropless field.

Late in the afternoon I reached the cathedral plaza in Segovia’s heart. I sat in the shade, rested, watched the square. Pigeons rose applauding in small crowds with echoey wing-claps. Hook-beaked stone gargoyles of vultures protruded from the cathedral’s exterior walls. Scattered upon the surface of its main dome were hundreds of pigeons, starlings and crows, looking as if they were preparing to carry the building aloft.

That night, from the southerly ramparts of the city, the Guadarrama showed as a long, low-slung silhouette, above which a red moon hung.

I slipped out of Segovia just before dawn and walked out along the Camino to the north-west, onto the
meseta
proper. There was a haze in the air again, the land was shivering up into the sky, and I imagined pilgrims all over Spain and France converging on the sacred point of Santiago de Compostela, passing over landscape that was both real to the foot and mirageous to the mind.

12

Ice

Kailash & Minya Konka — Pilgrims & summiteers — Panda-hunting — Jon Miceler — The death of Charlie — Peter-Panism — Sunlessness — Karim’s game theory of driving —Up the Dadu — The 1932 expedition —
Darshan!
— Kangding’s missionary — The sacredness of quartz — At Jatso’s stockade — Pyramidal mountains & their power to enchant — To the river — An ice armoury — Altitude sickness — Kiln-fired by cold —
Gomchen
&
tumo
— Milarepa & his songlines — A sacralized landscape — Completing the
kora
— ‘The traffic of love’ — Death on the mountain — The tenderness of glaciers — An arrow-shower of choughs — Footplinths — Encounters with an earlier self — The ghost path.

Of the many sacred mountains of Buddhism, the holiest is Mount Kailash in Western Tibet, where the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Indus and the Sutlej all have their source, and around whose base pilgrims have been walking circuits of notorious arduousness for thousands of years. The most extreme form of this
kora
– the Tibetan-Buddhist term for the form of pilgrimage in which the walker circumambulates, clockwise, the holy site – involves the pilgrim making body-length prostrations over the entire length of the circumambulation:
bend, kneel, lie face down, mark the earth with the fingers, rise, pray, shuffle forwards to the finger-marks, bend, kneel
… for thirty-two miles of rough rocky path, over the 18,000-foot Drölma pass.

Kailash is the most famous of the sacred peaks, but it is not – to my eye at least – the most graceful. That honour would go to Minya Konka, ‘The White Snow Peak of the Kingdom of Minyak’, a pyramidal mountain that rises in easterly isolation as the last great upsurge of the Central Asian ranges. Minya Konka is vast: 24,790 feet high, more than 1,500 feet higher than Kailash. From its sharp summit, the land plunges four vertical miles to the floodplain of the Sichuan Basin. Seen from the Basin, through rare breaks in the cloud, the peak rears up as if footless on the earth.

Since the 1200s, Buddhist pilgrims have been walking and riding to Minya Konka. Some have made the lengthy
kora
of the entire massif, a journey that takes several weeks. Others come to visit the monastery that faces the peak from the west, which is reputed to be the home of the reincarnated living Buddhas of Minya Konka, and was destroyed by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Others come just to see the mountain. ‘
The power of such
mountains,’ the Buddhist scholar Lama Govinda wrote of the peaks of Himalayan Buddhism:

is so great [that] people are drawn to them from near and far, as if by the force of some invisible magnet; and they will undergo untold hardships and privations in their inexplicable urge to approach … the centre of this sacred power. This worshipful … attitude is not impressed by scientific facts, like figures of altitude, which are foremost in the mind of modern man, nor is it motivated by an urge to ‘conquer’ the mountain.

Minya Konka has also drawn another kind of worshipper. Since the 1920s – when the mountain was first seen by two of Teddy Roosevelt’s sons, who were in Sichuan to prove their manhood by shooting pandas – mountaineers have also travelled to Minya Konka, pulled ‘as if by the force of some invisible magnet’ to try and reach the mountain’s sharp and ice-fluted summit. Many of them have died in the attempt, for Minya Konka is formidably difficult to ascend. Until 1999, more people had been killed climbing it than had reached its summit.

These two kinds of mountain-worshipper stand in strong contrast to one another. There is a humility to the act of the
kora
, which stands as a corrective to the self-exaltation of the mountaineer’s hunger for an utmost point. Circle and circuit, potentially endless, stand against the symbolic finality of the summit. The pilgrim on the
kora
contents himself always with looking up and inwards to mystery, where the mountaineer longs to look down and outwards onto knowledge.

In early winter, my friend Jon Miceler called to ask if I wanted to join him on a short expedition to Minya Konka, following the trails that once connected the tea-growing regions of Sichuan with Nepal and Tibet, and then the pilgrimage routes – some of them more than 700 years old – that converged on the peak. My interest in pilgrimage was growing increasingly strong, and my hunger for high mountains has long been unseemly. I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do, so I travelled to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in western China, and met Jon at his apartment there. He’d just returned from an attempted three-week vehicular traverse of the Burma Road.

‘Failed,’ he said ruefully. ‘Gumbo mud. Permit trouble. And way too many leeches.’

Jon is a Tibetologist, a polymath and an explorer. He’s also both a pilgrim and a mountaineer. American by birth, he was raised by a Buddhist mother and a physician father. For nearly twenty years he has been exploring the cultures and landscapes of the Eastern Himalaya: as a guide, historian and latterly as a regional director for the World Wildlife Fund. That remarkable fold of the world – the Burma–China–Tibet–India border – is his fascination; in particular its natural histories and spiritualities. He speaks Chinese fluently and Tibetan serviceably and his learning in Buddhism, especially Himalayan Buddhism, is near lifelong.

I couldn’t have asked for a better companion in that region. Jon is a formidably fit as well as erudite man. He is 6' 3" tall, thin and strong, with a freckled and sun-polished face, rimless glasses and a mop of curly dark hair. On the flat he moves with a bouncy lope that eats up the miles, and on the steep he moves with a steady herring-boned tread that eats up the yards. He has circumambulated Kailash four times, and he has made scores of what ecologists call ‘foot transects’: data-gathering treks, which in Jon’s case sometimes lasted months. Foot transects make possible an otherwise unattainable acquaintance with a region: the walker records and locates what he or she sees – species, scat, scrapes, weather, erosion – and the accidental encounters born of the transect’s line are part of its virtue as a method. Walking Himalayan paths again and again over twenty years has given Jon an exceptional first-hand knowledge – what in Greek might be termed
metis
, or in Chinese
nei heng
, both terms suggesting a ‘knowing through experience’ – but he wears it lightly and gives of it generously.

Jon’s heroes are the plant-hunter Frank Kingdon-Ward, the poet Gary Snyder and the legendary field biologist George B. Schaller, with whom Jon had become friends. It was Schaller who had taken the writer Peter Matthiessen into the north-west Nepal Himalaya in the 1970s in search of the
bharal
, the Himalayan blue sheep: that journey had issued into Matthiessen’s classic work
The Snow Leopard
(1978). Schaller’s walking powers and single-minded pursuit of field data were infamous. ‘
I should warn you
,’ a friend of Matthiessen had written to him on learning that he was to accompany Schaller into the high mountains, ‘the last friend I had who went walking with George in Asia came back – or more properly
turned
back – when his boots were full of blood …’ Matthiessen had passed the Schaller test, though, and so had Jon, who in 2001 accompanied Schaller up onto the area of northern Tibetan plateau known as the Chang Tang, where they discovered the birthing grounds of the endangered Tibetan antelope, the
chiru
.
*
But I was anxious about my ability to pass the Miceler test.