The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (31 page)

Sitting there on the pass, the summit of Minya Konka seemed implausibly easy to ascend. I could tell Erik was thinking the same thing: as if we might just step across the space that separated us from it, dance up its avalanche slopes, teeter along its ridges, float over its cream-puff glaciers, and touch its enchanted summit … I shook my head to rid it of such nonsense. The pass was wind-scoured, and no place to loiter long. Far below us was the river gorge that separated our range from the Konka massif. We had miles to go before we slept, somewhere in that valley.

So it was down, steeply down, across shale slopes, the stones of the path flowing in the sunlight, the horses skidding on their front hooves, braking with their back hooves, deerskin bags lurching forwards on their flanks, their bells tolling rapid alarm. We came on behind, tracing a stream-cut as it plunged off the pass, following it between saplings of pine and Himalayan oak and through bushes of rhododendron, stumbling in powder snow that reached knee-deep in places. The stream was part frozen: halted mid-leap in elaborate forms of yearning – chandeliers, ink-flicks and hat feathers. On the west side of the valley, the tops of distant oaks shone like brass in the sunlight. A small bright bird flew to a gnarled pine. We rested in a clearing at a shepherd’s hut. I sat with my back against the warm wall, facing the sun and the mountain, narrowing my eyes.

Hours later, we emerged from the forest at the main river. Just downstream of us was a frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high and a hundred across, hanging off the vertical side of the gorge. Racked spears and lances of ice, glittering in the late light: an armoury. The moon was showing in the sky. We found a little flood-flattened shore of rock-sand knitted over with grass, big enough for two tents. Jatso hobbled the horses and scavenged dead wood to build a fire, while we pitched the tents. Oak leaves spun slowly out in the river’s centre as the current raced them away.

Once the first chores had been done I worked my way upstream through brush until I was out of sight of the camp, stripped off, cracked the ice away from the river’s edge and bathed briefly, sluicing off the day’s sweat. ‘You Brits are all the same,’ said Jon when I returned, faintly blue around the mouth and lips, but happy. ‘Always looking for a mountain bath. Tillman never thought a day was done until he’d had his bath.’ Jon had made a rough fire pit out of flat rocks and got a wood fire going. In the centre he’d stacked three rocks into a trivet, on which he set a big metal kettle boiling. We sat on stones and warmed our bare feet against the flames.

Half an hour later, altitude sickness struck me like a blow from the back of an axe. If you’ve ever suffered from altitude sickness, you’ll know how debilitating it is. Nausea, bone-hurt and skull-ache. A medieval pain-helmet of pig-iron jammed down over the head. A bad attack can kill you. A mild attack leaves you mute as a fish and sick as a dog. Each time I come to altitude and fall sick, I vow that I won’t return. Once, in a hut in the French Alps, I wrote that vow down and signed it – an affidavit to a future self – but then became so disoriented that I lost the piece of paper. At 21,000 feet in the Nepal Himalaya, I walked a snow-path spattered to either side with the blood and vomit of previous trekkers, their bodies wrecked by the arduousness of the height. Old remedies for altitude sickness include soaking a cloth or sponge in urine and holding it to the nose and mouth. This is not something I’ve tried.

Two hours later, I was able to speak again. We sat around the fire in the bitter darkness while the kettle spat water at the flames and the flames hissed back. From the night came the cold clink of the horses’ bells. ‘What was it Kerouac said?’ asked Jon just before we all headed to our tents. ‘ “Let us sleep by rivers and purify our ears.” ’

Of the nights I spent out while following my paths, that one was by far the coldest. At its lowest, it reached -20°C: a dry cold, but a cold that stole to the bone. None of us really slept except for Jatso, with whom I shared a tent and who snored inspiringly from beneath a heap of blankets for ten hours. At one point I crawled out of the tent to try and shake warmth back into my limbs. The sky was framed by the black valley sides. There was a shooting star and then a satellite, winking across the darkness. A gold-grey flutter of light from the fire. A curd-yellow moon. Old land, high crags, silence, the moon, the fire, and a feeling of deep calm and connection.

When I came out again in the dawn half-light, everything in the valley was edged with frost. When I pulled my sleeping bag out, I found it had frozen into a rigid cocoon. I propped it up against a tree. I looked for my trousers, but they’d also frozen. I stood them beside the sleeping bag. It was so cold that even Jatso wrapped a scarf around his nose and mouth, and tucked his trousers into his socks.

But to wake up in that wild place, in such weather, on such a morning? Sleeplessness and core-temperature loss felt like minor costs. Jon cajoled the fire back into life. We sat around its flames, roasting our bared feet from ice back to flesh. The diesel in our fuel bottles had congealed into jelly, so Erik laid the cylinder in the fire to warm it back into useful life. Sunlight tipped off the high peaks to our west, then the sun itself flashed over the eastern summits, and warmth and light came flooding down.

I asked Jon about the lives of the early Buddhist saints: men who lived up in these fastnesses, in such conditions, for almost their whole lives. How could they have stood it?

‘But this was what they came here for,’ he replied. ‘Deeply forested valleys, the roar of the river, the silence of the skies. That’s what these
gomchen
– these great meditators – needed to reach their levels of concentration. Men like Milarepa, the eleventh-century hermit who set his spiritual peregrinations to verse, writing a vast and complex web of songlines for the high Himalayas which are still sung today.

‘Milarepa taught a form of tantric yoga called
tumo
. Practitioners of
tumo
were, at their most powerful, able to generate an extreme body heat. Milarepa’s sect of Tantric Buddhism was famous, in fact, because they only ever wore one layer of white cotton cloth. It was supposedly this inner heat of
tumo
which allowed them to sit out in these landscapes and meditate, even in the harshest conditions.

‘I remember once,’ Jon continued, ‘when I was in north-west India with a group of Ladakhi hermits, cave-dwellers who practised a similar form of Buddhism. These men became renowned for displaying – to a few select foreigners, not including myself – a certain trick. At about 4,000 metres they would soak their robes in water, then sit outside in the winter wind and
steam
their cloaks dry. Get that! Their
tumo
was an inner furnace, so hot that it turned water to steam.’

‘I could have done with some
tumo
last night,’ I said.

That morning’s ascent, on a subtle path up through sparkling oak and pine woods, was among the finest forest hours I have ever spent. Sunlight, sifted by foliage, cross-hatched the path. The lower head of the valley was lost in haze. Another unidentifiable snow range rose above it. We might have been walking through a Chinese scroll painting. The understorey of the forest was thickened with rhododendron, whose leaves shone bronze where the full light caught them. Up through the trees we went, crossing iced streams and passing through tunnels of leaning oaks, following a leaf-and-dirt path. Cairns marked its route, some with niches filled with flower heads, leaves and feathers.

‘We’ve joined the pilgrim trails now,’ said Jon.

Up and on for hours, until finally our path cut sharply back north and its uphill bank began to show further eye-catching evidence of pilgrimage – prayers scrawled on paper and weighted down with stones; articles of clothing shed in obeisance; strings of flags. Like a stream flowing into a river our subsidiary path was absorbed into the main pilgrim route, and like a river, too, this new path divided as it encountered obstacles, finding various ways around boulders, trees,
stupas
and
mani
stone walls, about which pilgrims had performed miniature
koras
, beating circular paths into the dry earth. I was surprised at how busy the route to Minya Konka seemed to be, for the Chinese colonization of Tibet in the 1950s, and the subsequent violent suppression of traditional Tibetan Buddhism, had made pilgrimage much more difficult, especially for ordinary Tibetans. The numbers undertaking the
kora
had dropped drastically.

I felt excited to be walking these paths, which so many pilgrims had followed over centuries, drawn to this great and sacred mountain and others like it. Running through my brain, falling into a rhythm to which I set my pace, was a Spanish palindrome on the subject of pilgrimage: ‘
La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural
’ – ‘The path provides the natural next step’. Its chiasmic form cleverly acknowledged the transformative consequences of the foot-pilgrimage, which returns the traveller to his origin and turns the mind back upon itself, leaving the pilgrim both ostensibly unchanged and profoundly redirected. It recalled Thomas’s method of making one-day walks in the design of ‘
a rough circle
’, trusting that he might ‘by taking a series of turnings to the left or a series to the right … take much beauty by surprise and … return at last to my starting-point’.

The clean tinkle of a bell – and round the corner came a man riding a chestnut horse, magnificently dressed in brocades and silks of river-green, red and blue, stitched and patterned into dragons and interlacings. The silk rang in the sunlight like armour. He took the reins in his left hand, raised his right hand in greeting and then passed on around a bend in the path, back or forwards to whatever time he had come from, his appearance entirely in keeping with that magical forest.

Finally we emerged from an arch in the trees and there right upon us was the Minya Konka monastery, perched on the brink of a ravine, and right upon the monastery, it seemed, was the mountain itself, hidden from us all morning by the slope and the trees.

I hadn’t ever before reached a mountain landscape so wholly sacralized, in which almost every human mark was either an expression of devotion or a marker of
hierophany
. Everything was oriented towards the peak. On the west-facing slopes were stands of white wooden lances, ten or fifteen feet tall, each pennanted with white prayer flags that snapped in the wind, dispersing
om mani padme hums
to every direction. Wide stones marked with crosses or footprints showed places where lamas had self-arisen, creating images of themselves through intense meditation. There were stupas, and
mani
stone piles, and there was the monastery itself, its windows and doorways gazing up at Minya Konka.

‘
Nayri
,’ said Jon. ‘
Nayri
is the Tibetan term for a sacred place such as this:
ri
means “mountain”, and you’ll find it everywhere in Tibet;
nay
means something like “embodiment of the sacred”.
Nay
could be found in a series of rocks, or a tree, but it’s most usually present in a mountain.’

We dropped our packs, tethered the horses and sat quietly on a grass bank near the monastery in the sunlight. Dirty grey moraine slopes led the eye up to Minya Konka’s south ridge, which rose finely towards its summit. Ravens flew north in the ravine beneath us. The earth of the path was terracotta. Sunlight curled and pooled on the shell of a blue-black beetle dragging and bumping itself towards the monastery. Racks of incense sticks smouldered, rings of orange fire creeping down them, blue smoke coiling up into the still air. A monk walked back and forth along the front of the monastery, rumbling a line of heavy bronze prayer wheels with his fingertips. I felt a familiar tingle in my stomach, the mixture of fear and something like lust that high mountains have often provoked in me.

In
The Living Mountain
, Nan Shepherd described the conversion in her relationship with mountains that she experienced in the course of her life. As a young woman, she had been prone to a longing for ‘
the tang of height
’, and had approached the Cairngorms egocentrically, apprising them only for their ‘effect upon me’. Over time, however, she learnt to go into the hills aimlessly, ‘to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him’, or to ‘go round’ the mountain ‘in circles to see if it is a good place’. Circumambulation came to replace summit-fever for Shepherd; plateau substituted for peak. ‘
I believe that I now understand
,’ she wrote in the last paragraph of the last chapter of her book, ‘in some small measure why the Buddhist goes on pilgrimage to a mountain.’ She had come to practise her own
kora
, and the Cairngorms had become sacred to her in the materialist sense of being consistently marvellous but also partially explicable. Sitting there in the sun, looking up at Minya Konka, I thought that I had undergone a similar conversion; pushing when young for the summits of mountains, longing to get into unmapped and unexplored territory, but now happier on the beaten track, following the footsteps of others.

A man and a woman plodded towards us, leading a horse between them on which a young boy sat, swaddled in fur and quilted blankets. They stopped to speak with us. The horse cropped the thin winter grass of the bank. The man held a gold-braided halter rope loosely in his hand. His wife smiled, her hands clasped in front of her. Their boots were very worn and dusty. They were farmers from a hundred miles or so away, and they had just that day completed, the man explained to Jon, the full
kora
of Minya Konka. There was no pride or self-acclaim apparent in his explanation, just a calm recording of a fact and an air of weary gladness.

‘Let me tell you the story I promised you,’ Jon said, gesturing up at Minya Konka, after the pilgrims had walked on, ‘the one that’ll put you off a summit attempt for ever. For you must be assured that every route on this mountain has one foot in the grave. In 1980, China opened its doors to Western mountaineers for the first time since 1949, and there was a rush among climbers in the know to get to the gems. Although at that time there were many unclimbed mountains, Minya Konka was one of the great challenges. It had been climbed, epically, by the American team in 1932–3, then by a Chinese team in 1956, but that was it. So in 1980, a friend of mine called Rick Ridgeway – the first American to summit K2 – along with a guide called Kim Schmitz, a man called Yvon Chouinard, who founded Patagonia, and a young mountain photographer called Jonathan Wright came here to make an attempt on Minya Konka. They arrived at the monastery in wrathful weather, and after establishing a low camp up on the moraine, they began the hard mixed climbing that is necessary just to access Konka’s north-west ridge. You can see the difficulty of ascent from here.’ Jon pointed up at the ridge: bulging snowfields, desperate fall-lines.