Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © James Crowden 2020

Cover illustration © Joe Maclaren

Crystal goose image © Trustees of the British Museum. All other images © the author

James Crowden asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008353216

eBook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008353193

Version: 2020-09-09

Epigraph

‘The valley of the Zangskar River is quite impassable, except when the winter’s frost makes a road over the waters of the river.’

Frederick Drew, 1875

Map

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Epigraph

5  Map

6  Contents

7  THE PURSUIT OF SILENCE

8  1 THE ROAD TO ZANGSKAR

9 2 VILLAGE LIFE: PADUM

10  3 SNOW AND NEW YEAR

11  4 CHADAR – THE RIVER FROZEN

12  5 KARSHA MONASTERY

13  6 WOLVES AND AVALANCHES

14  Afterword

15  Acknowledgements

16  Notes

17  Bibliography

18  Index

19  Picture Section

20  Also by James Crowden

21  About the Author

22  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

List of Pagesiiiivvviii134567891011121314151617181920212223252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899100101102103104105106107108109110111112113114115116117118119120121122123124125126127128129130131132133134135136137138139140141142143144145146147148149150151152153154155156157158159160161162163164165166167168169170171172173174175176177178179180181182183184185186187188189190191192193194195196197198199200201202203204205206207208209210211212213214215216217218219220221222223225226227228229230231232233234235236237238239240241242243244245246247248249250251252253254255256257258259260261262263264265266267268269270271272273274275276277278279280281282283284285286287288289290291292293294295296297298299300301302303304305306307308309310311312315316317318319320321322323324325326327328329330331332333334335336337338339340341342ii

PROLOGUE

The Pursuit of Silence

The valley

Silence, snow and solitude have got hold of me and will not let go. I am possessed by mountains, cold and ice. Winter has a very firm grip upon my soul. It is like a disease, a form of spiritual possession, mountain fever. And yet there is no escape. I am here for the duration, locked into a little-known Tibetan Buddhist valley at high altitude, sandwiched between the main Himalayan range and the Karakoram.

One by one all the high passes have shut behind me and will not re-open again for six or seven months. The local people, the Zangskaris, spend half their lives huddled round small stoves burning yak dung and tamarisk scrub to keep warm. It is dark in their houses. How they survive and how they live over the winter surrounded by so much snow and ice is still something of a mystery. Only one other Westerner has spent a winter in Zangskar, an eccentric Hungarian linguist called Alexander Csoma de Kőrös. But that was over 150 years ago, and of the Zangskari winter he left no record.

Imagine if your family had lived in the mountains for a thousand years or more; what effect would that have upon your mind and your thinking, on your awareness and the way in which you perceived things? Imagine how much silence your family would have absorbed and accumulated along the way. Zangskaris try to preserve the teaching about the silence that emerges between words. The teaching is at times very formal but also very subtle, hinting at the space which exists when words run out. And then there is the silence of Dzogchen and the mountains, which cannot really be taught – only passed on from teacher to pupil. The language of Buddhism and compassion runs through their daily lives in Zangskar like an invisible thread.

To the south lies the vibrant and colourful Indian subcontinent. To the north, the dry, sandy deserts of Central Asia; to the west, Kashmir, the jagged front line with Pakistan; to the east, the lonely, vast nomadic plateau of Tibet. A place of meditation, debate and monastic scholarship. Zangskar is remote even by Himalayan standards.

Deep silence, deep snow and deep solitude. These are the inner coordinates that matter most to me. For various reasons I have sought out this seclusion, this retreat from the world. Ultimate peace and quiet. Remoteness is a state of mind – you either possess it, or you have to go and find it. But once you have found that particular form of solitude and tasted its fruits, you will go back time and time again to touch base with the wilderness and emptiness that live within the mountains. To embrace such mountains is perhaps part of the human condition.

The prospect of travelling down the frozen Zangskar river beckoned just as strongly as the silence of winter. Sleeping rough, sleeping in caves, sleeping out in the snow – you live on your wits. One false step, one major crack in the ice or serious slip that catapults you towards the open water and you are lost. The river is fast, deep and cold. A heavy pack drags you down very quickly. A swift end. Zangskar is dangerous in winter.

More than anything else in the world I wanted to make this journey down the frozen river. To the best of my knowledge no Westerner had ever sampled its delights and dangers. Although it was a challenge that I relished, I had much to learn. The mountains were calling in a silent language that I had yet to decipher. I longed for ice and the solitude, but the mountains had many tricks up their sleeve.

The ice road

Sometimes if the ice was clear I could see right through to the very bottom of the river bed where pebbles lay in many colours: grey, rusty brown, black, orange, even mauve. The water had a wonderful greenish tinge. At other times the ice was so thick, strong and opaque that you could almost drive a tank along it. When the ice gets thin the river becomes truly dangerous, wafer-thin ice with hidden whirlpools silently churning away down below. A trap that lies in wait for the unwary.

As you tread upon its surface, the frozen river leaves its indelible mark upon your consciousness. It becomes the mirror of your soul. You develop an inner strength and confidence that stays with you for the rest of your life. A yardstick. A rite of passage. An initiation. Zangskaris call the frozen river chadar: the ice sheet, ice road, ice blanket, frozen one. They respect it. It is a central part of their winter.

You quickly learn to read the ice, taking in old fractures and broken lines at a glance, seeking out inconsistencies that upset the river’s own intention and intrigue. The river is alive with subtle shifts of direction and momentum. Solid currents woven into intricate patterns. Streams of trapped bubbles. Long lines of them, as if a diver were down below. Oval, mirrored, many-layered. Hypnotic. The flow in suspension. Encased in ice. Preserved in aspic, solidified, mute.

The feeling of being trapped in the gorge for days on end is not at all unpleasant. Almost comforting, like being embraced by mountains. There is a sense of expectation that has a certain edge to it, as if trespassing, a frisson shared with cold, sharp, early morning air. You are very alive. Adrenalin kicks in. Your breathing changes, you become aware of every sound. You plumb the depths of the silence. You are not just trapped in the gorge, you are running on a sinuous course that curves and then cuts through a vast mountain range. Geology sliced through, laid bare. Millions of years of sedimentary rocks, twisted, contorted, at times almost vertical, Buddhist time and geological time on a par with each other. You slide, skate and shuffle as if the river is pulling you along. The journey has a momentum all of its own, like running on a silver thread.

When you are on the chadar, the frozen river, everything changes. Your life has different parameters. Your world is narrowed down to this gorge. You become very focused, as all climbers must be. Balance becomes vital. You test yourself against the rock, against the ice, against the frozen river itself. You become tall and confident, attuned to the river’s voice. You learn to read its character by tapping the ice with your stick and patiently listening to the echo, and the echo of the echo, to gauge its solidity, for you are tapping into the river’s own energy, reading its mind as it twists and turns, almost like the mind of a wild animal, predicting the flow of the river under the ice and at certain times the flow of water over the ice. Like sonar or asdic, you wait for the returning ping. Resonance and pitch are vital. Tap, tap, tap. You listen to the echo bouncing back. Each vibration has a fragility. You read the ice visually as well. Each little imperfection registered, logged just in case the levels change. You navigate by the odd stunted juniper tree, small side nallahs (gullies, side valleys or steep ravines and watercourses that are often dried up), caves, tall frozen waterfalls, old avalanche cones, certain outcrops of rock, odd patterns in the strata, changes of direction in the colours and the shifts of light. Your mind logs them all.

You learn that rivers freeze in different ways at different times. Sometimes the frozen river breaks rank and rears up a dozen feet or more in the air, solid and chaotic, pack ice riding up over itself in great thick broken sheets. Sometimes the frozen river detonates like artillery as it moves and buckles, sharp cracks that echo upwards in the narrow confines of the gorge. It keeps you on your toes. Cracks accelerate. Sometimes the frozen river is silent. Sometimes it talks in riddles. You have to read the runes. Learn from the older men. Read their silence as well. The mind is always alert.

When I went down the frozen river alongside the Zangskaris I was not only aware of the danger but of intense beauty. Time had no meaning. We were as if in orbit, totally disconnected from the safety of the world as we had known it. We walked on borrowed time. We were in the grip of a journey and an adventure that was far larger than ourselves. The bonds with the rock and the mountains were as strong as the bonds between each of us.

Sometimes I felt very safe, at other times I was in great peril. Occasionally when the ice gave out I had to climb out of the sheer-sided gorge and take to the cliffs, climbing upwards to find a horizontal fault. That was when you were closest to the rock, gingerly creeping along narrow ledges fifty or sixty feet above the open water with no ropes or belays. My fingers would be numb and unresponsive. I would cling on for dear life, holding my stick and at the same time manoeuvring along the ledge with a heavy pack. When the cliff was close to your face, your nose rubbed the rock and you could smell its fragrance: intimate, earthy, hard, almost metallic.

I followed the Zangskaris, who are as agile as ibex and as wily as snow leopards. They are butter traders and carried many kilos of valuable butter on their backs to sell in the bazaars of Leh, the main town of central Ladakh. Fine yellow butter made from the female yaks on the high pastures, now stored in goatskins or crinkled sheep’s stomachs, butter that is sought after for Tibetan salt tea and highly prized in winter. Butter trading is their only source of income in winter.

But the Zangskari winter is not just one winter; it is the memory of many winters rolled into one. It is the story of survival, not just of one village, but of many villages – a collective memory that is as large as the valley itself. Maybe ten thousand souls are trapped each year in the Zangskar valley, including monks and nuns, yaks, sheep and goats. Winter is nature’s way of preserving itself. Only man can destroy the silence. Only man can appreciate it.

These times on the ice road were off limits. They were beyond the normal remit of village life. A strange rendezvous within the mountains. Only for a month or two each winter can the frozen river be used safely as a highway. The chadar is a world unto itself. Some Zangskaris make the journey every year, others twice or even three times in a single winter. They make it a central part of their lives. A dangerous economy. Trading mountains for wisdom, butter for rupees and precious supplies. Each person takes back what they can in the depths of their minds, that is all you can take from the valley, but it will last you a lifetime. Such silence is like a jewel set deep in the mountains. A natural way of being that takes root of its own accord in your consciousness.

Very occasionally men fall into the river and are swept under the ice with their packs. Others are caught by avalanches, whose power is unpredictable and swift. This was a foray into the unknown. New territory. A real challenge. I would be making the journey both ways.

In Zangskar they have their own dialect, which some say relates back to old Tibetan where the ‘silent’ letters in Tibetan are still pronounced. Tenzin is Stenzin and Padum is Spadum. But it is the unspoken language of winter that I want to explore, the silent language of mountains and survival.

Here the mountains are guardians of silence and the long winter a vital part of that equation. The invisible energy of winter has no name and cannot easily be defined, yet it is very real and abundant. It has a wisdom all of its own. It is traded in small caves and monasteries. Some even call it Buddhism.

White mountains

In Sanskrit Him Alaya translates as ‘abode of snow’ or ‘snow dwelling’. In Tibetan or Ladakhi, the peaks are simply called Pabu Riga or ‘white mountains’. In reality they are a vast, complicated maze of sharp, awe-inspiring mountains, swift rivers, rich pastures and long, wide glaciers – a zone where snow leopards, bears, ibex, wolves, marmots and the mythical Tibetan snow lions roam, a belt of mountains two hundred miles wide that stretches for one and a half thousand miles along India’s northern borders, one of nature’s most challenging and complex barriers.

The Himalaya is not one range but many. At the western end there is the Dhaula Dhar, the Pir Panjal, the main Himalayan range, and the Zangskar and Ladakh ranges, then finally the Karakoram, which in Turkic means ‘black gravel’ or ‘black sands’. These mountains are a direct result of the Indian subcontinent shifting itself further northward each year. An enormous collision in slow motion, the mountains are young, tempestuous and unpredictable, the peaks still rising. Landslides are common. A world of its own – a spiritual reservoir, a place of pilgrimage and devotion. The source of all things in India: life and water.

Zangskar is made up of two high-altitude valleys drained by cold, fast-flowing, tempestuous rivers: Stod and Lungnak. These meet in the central plain to form the Zangskar river, which then flows north through a gorge for about a hundred miles, twisting and turning this way and that, cutting through a whole mountain range till it meets the River Indus. This junction is the northern end of the chadar, the ice road that connects Zangskar with central Ladakh and the old trading town of Leh, with its old bazaar and crumbling caravanserais. From Leh, ancient connections once spread out like a spider’s web across the Karakoram to the old city states of Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan, and further east to the trading oasis of Dunhuang, with its highly decorated Buddhist caves. Central Asia – a meeting place of many ideas and beliefs. The Silk Road, a slender path weaving through the mountains along which people’s lives were led. Leh and its traders have many stories to tell.

Ladakh, known as ‘Little Tibet’, ‘Western Tibet’, ‘Indian Tibet’ or the ‘Land of High Passes’, is a remote Himalayan kingdom about four times the size of Wales. The four major mountain ranges that run through Ladakh are subdivided into small, secluded valleys. It is one of the highest inhabited places in the world, a remarkable enclave and a fine tribute to the inhabitants’ farming skills. These mountains are also crucial to Zangskar’s seclusion and individuality. The lowest pass into Zangskar from the west is at 14,500ft and the highest from the south over the main Himalayan range is over 18,000ft and only open for one or two months in the summer. These higher routes often cross glaciers riddled with crevasses. There is no easy way into Zangskar, and no easy way out.

The valley is almost entirely self-sufficient. But in late winter food and fodder can sometimes run perilously low. Solitary confinement, but of the very best kind. Seclusion. A rare commodity these days.

Dry, dusty dry, fierce Central Asian dry, the climate of Ladakh is that of a mountain desert. It lies in a rain shadow where everything is dependent on glaciers, meltwater and irrigation. Cold in winter, hot in summer.

The room

For winter and most of the next summer I lived in the middle of Zangskar in a small, draughty, mud-bricked room. This was Padum, the capital of Zangskar, which in its heyday had its own seven-storey fort-cum-palace. The palace had crumbled. The village had seen better days.

The small room jutted out of the roof of the house and was only used in summer, which is why it was so draughty. It was exposed to the elements on all four sides. There was no heating. Yet that room was vital to me. My hermit’s cell. A place of retreat and contemplation. Base camp, where I spread out all my food and belongings.

To cook I had a blue compact petrol stove, which was excellent. I also had a Primus stove that ran on kerosene, but the jets often got blocked up and had to be pricked. My low-grade fuel resulted in lots of dark smoke and even steam emerging. It often spluttered till the stove really got going.

All my belongings and expedition paraphernalia lay scattered on the floor of the room, dumped higgledy-piggledy just as they had been when they were offloaded. Four sturdy packhorses had brought the supplies into the valley from Panikar, the roadhead in Suru, a journey of a hundred miles on foot over the Pense La, a relatively easy pass in summer. But this was mid-November, when snow could come down at any moment.

The walk into Zangskar took six days, with temperatures down to about -20°C. At that time there was no road into Zangskar, so the sound of an internal combustion engine had never been heard in the valley. Being a backwater had its own distinct advantages. Such deep and continuous silence was a great virtue and a rare commodity, highly prized by meditators, the true connoisseurs of silence.

Among many other things I wanted to study the effect of the road being built into the valley. Started in the 1960s, the road to Zangskar had progressed very slowly. It was as if the clock had been wound back five hundred years. Zangskar in those days was like old Ladakh – ancient Tibet – a world apart. A rare survival. A spiritual gem. A horse and sheep economy. A monastic realm of monks and nuns, where barley and yaks reigned supreme.

I also realised that by studying the valley I was possibly – in some measure – changing the outcome. In the physics of relativity this is called the ‘observer effect’. I was, after all, an outsider. I also had a hunch that many more people would visit over the next few decades and thus alter the fragile balance that had evolved without modern technology. In the future Zangskar’s peace and quiet would be under very real threat. Once the road was through, their world would change dramatically and in ways that could not be predicted. Younger men and women seemed to welcome the road and its connection with modern India, but others were more sceptical. It was a crucial year. There was no turning back.

Ice ferns

At first light I would lean up on one elbow and, with my arm outstretched, reach up with my right hand and with bare fingernails scrape the ice away from the inside of the window to get a better view of the mountain that lay behind the village. The window was close to the floor and only had two small panes of glass, each held within a simple wooden frame. Every night the frost slowly crept back into the room and flexed its silver muscles to take control once more. On the inner surface of the glass, icy ferns formed from the moisture of my own breath and night-time breathing, moisture which within the very dry air slowly formed its own gallery. Long, curved, delicate ferns reached out from the borders, from the corners of the frame and eventually curled back on themselves. These patterns were a constant source of enchantment, for they grew silently above my head and in the dark each crystal curve formed its own trajectory, swirling like underwater currents. By morning each pane of glass had created its own universe in miniature, which, when observed carefully, looked for all the world like a map of the mountain range within which I was trapped, with ridges and side valleys, hidden nallahs and deep gorges, all unexplored and enticing.

This forest of rime and hoar frost was wondrous and every night made, as if on a whim, its own secret patterns, icy maps that I longed to study and traverse with my eye, as if flying or drifting above them in a hot-air balloon or even peering the wrong way down a telescope or the barrel of a microscope into the substrata of some little-known crystal world or the inner workings of a new species invisible to the naked eye. These icy maps reminded me of fractal geometry and Mandelbrot patterns that repeated themselves on many different levels of magnification. Even the tips curled like ferns. It seemed that these mysterious maps in some way mirrored and then charted my own mind. An intimate survey of unknown constellations where ideas and journeys grew of their own accord, flourished and then jostled for attention and space before vanishing as mysteriously as they had arrived.

As if the mind was transformed from being merely a window through which we observed the outside world and other people, into something much more interesting, where a simple pane of glass became metamorphosed overnight into a thing of wonder, a glass negative, or light-sensitive plate, such as early photographers used to use. And upon the plate, exposed, a rich, opaque sheen upon which our nocturnal ideas, our hopes and fears, our past and future peregrinations, our deepest secrets and lucid longings could engrave themselves, and where for a few precious hours at least, these notions were stored and made visible to ourselves. As if each fern were a dream that went back in time to the outer rim of the simple wooden window frame, which held the pattern secure. Back to the very source of things, where language had another dimension and even the smallest flicker of the candle mattered. Ice is simply water that has stopped in its tracks, the flow arrested. A crystal universe that has its own rules.

And so it was that every morning I would retrace my own particular journey back through other mountain ranges. It was as if by being very still for weeks and months on end, the mind could at long last catch up with itself. And in those delicate ferns and ice crystals I could see my own inner journey from one end of a long mountain chain to another. As if each peak were connected to its neighbour, and in the rhythm of the valleys and rivers each peak moved with the seasons and shed its ideas like meltwater. Mountain thinking. A rich, varied landscape that fed my soul. But winter was long in the making.

Winter, winter. A time of gathering in, of holding close, of paring down, of minimal movement, of unfolding hibernation. Time without boundaries, which in its own way cultivated a richness and a sensitivity that had been buried within me for many years, a deep sense of returning, of coming home at last. I was remote yet perfectly at peace with myself.

In that room those ice ferns and ice patterns, so thinly engraved onto the window, became my friends and relatives. I used to follow them and read into them all sorts of journeys and ideas, and yet it was impossible to detect or predict points at which the story might change course or an idea become reality. Many of these narratives stretched deep into the past, but others leapt into the future. It was a place of germination as well as rumination, an internal barometer that registered the smallest change. The dialogue was with one’s self and the outer world. Yet there was no real need to retreat. The natural world was perfectly calm and the Zangskari culture a mirror into which I gazed.

Yet every day I had to destroy a part of this delicate and intricate world, and carve through this map of ice ferns, breaking the delicate ice filaments to see another natural wonder, which was of a different scale altogether and overlooked the whole valley. As I scraped away I felt the coldness of the ice crystals accumulate under my fingernails. I listened to the scraping noise, and then I would turn my head, strain my neck a little and look up, and while still lying down on the floor I would catch the first glimpse of dawn as the sudden pinkish light gently touched the mountain top that lay to the south. Very slowly I would watch as the light crept down the mountainside towards the monastery and then the village. I would wait for its warm rays to reach the room before stirring, unless of course snow was falling, which it once did for ten whole days.

There was no bed, no mattress, no blanket, no charpoy. My only luxury a sleeping bag that was laid out on a threadbare carpet. Under this was a bit of old, worn hessian sack that had been used as padding for the pack animals under their wooden saddles. This provided some small insulation, but the pressed earth floor was undulating and dusty. A little bumpy yet no real draughts. The ice crystals under my fingernails were unbelievably cold. Life was very basic. That was how I liked it. I always slept on the floor, it was warmer that way.

The window

That window was crucial to my existence. It was my eye onto the world, a lens like a porthole through which I could peer – and it lay just above where I slept. Those two panes of glass meant everything to me. They were only nine inches high by nine inches wide, and yet they would have been carefully carried on a man’s back for a hundred miles or more over the mountain passes, wrapped in straw and hessian and carried on wooden frames like artist’s easels to prevent them breaking. Glass in this valley was still something of a novelty and had an enchantment. It was treated with great respect and doubled if not tripled its value with its precarious journey. In their winter quarters the villagers often only had a wooden board that they opened slightly to let the smoke of the open cooking fires escape. It was often too cold to have glass in winter. Light came either from candles or small oil lamps using mustard oil. Some had old-style hurricane lanterns. One or two even had the newfangled pressurised Tilley lamps with a white mantle that glowed as they pumped it up. These ran on kerosene and were a constant source of entertainment, and for the man that owned the lantern a source of pride and status.

Even the wood for the window frame had travelled several hundred miles up the winding valleys from Kashmir, the lengths of timber carried on the backs of horses and yaks over the same passes that I had crossed (Zoji La and Pense La). Some timber also came from the south from the other side of the main Himalayan range, having been dragged across glaciers. Horses and men sometimes slipped down crevasses and had to be rescued with ropes. The temporary roadhead in Suru was a hundred miles away. That was where I had set out from in mid-November with four packhorses, a journey not without its problems.

Like most windows in this valley, the frame had open latticework at the bottom to let the air in, for this was a summer room. The passage of air was then cool and welcome, but in winter it was very different. Winds coming down from the mountains were often cruel and dusty. Whirling dervishes, dust devils, djinns, call them what you will, were common as the wind raced across the central plain. Cold winds that came off the glaciers chilled you to the bone.

This latticework below the window and the gaps round the window frames were temporarily blocked off with pages torn from a child’s exercise book. I jammed cotton wool into the gaps with my penknife, then tried to seal the joints with precious strips of Elastoplast to keep the wind and dust out. But fine particles of snow nevertheless crept in and covered everything.

Often I would wake covered in a fine dusting of snow. But it did not melt, even on the sleeping bag, for the temperature inside the room and outside was not that different. I had two plastic greenhouse thermometers so that I could monitor the temperatures. I discovered that if it was -20°C outside it was about -10°C inside. If it was -30°C outside, it was about -15°C inside. All very scientific, till a young lad stole one of the thermometers. It was returned a day or two later but sadly it was broken.

After a while the degree of cold becomes academic. Dry cold can be very deceptive. But when you are travelling outdoors for long distances on your own it is a matter of life, death and stamina. The main thing was to avoid sweat that then freezes on your clothing, and frostbite to fingers, toes, ears and nose. Sometimes when cross-country skiing I tied a blue and white spotted handkerchief across my mouth like a bandit or bank robber to stop the freezing air entering my lungs. The main thing was to keep moving and only stop for a few minutes at a time unless the sun was out. I had to prepare myself for the frozen river.

I slept with a dark blue woollen balaclava pulled down over my head and fingerless mitts on my hands in case I got frostbite. Three pairs of socks, long johns and two sweaters, one oiled wool, a fisherman’s Guernsey. Just right for the mountains and very hard wearing. Even indoors you had to be careful.

From here the village looked for all the world like a small convoy of tramp steamers with deck cargo. Flat roofs jostled with each other, covered in piles of firewood, kindling, scrub, roots, tamarisk and hay. Hatches all battened down for a storm and the odd grey-blue wisp of wood smoke wafting in the early morning air. Always quiet first thing, and if the weather was good the animals would be let out for fresh air and left to their own devices. They did not stray far and just milled around. They were very social and had their own pecking order. They valued human contact and were on almost equal terms to the people. For water, they ate snow.

Halfway down the outside wall was the third pane of glass. This was green and slightly frosted, and when the sun eventually hit the glass it cast a magnificent greenish light that gave the room the air of a monastic chapel or hermit’s cell. Such joys of colour must have lifted the souls of monks long ago, encouraging them to believe in the sanctity of light and the visual spectrum of nature’s palette. Such small delights made life here not just bearable but bountiful. Light was a resource in winter, and unlike the Arctic and Antarctic regions there were not the interminable hours of darkness to contend with. You made use of every scrap of sun to warm yourself, and many people worked on their rooftops spinning and weaving whenever they could.

When I first moved in I measured the room with an old wooden ski pole with leather straps and round baskets at the base, more akin to those used by Shackleton or Scott than what you might see on the chic slopes of the Alps. The room was 9ft 6in wide and 14ft 2in long. It was not a true rectangle, and the corresponding sides were about a foot longer in each direction, which gave it an interesting visual perspective. Nothing was quite square or even. This suited me fine. A rhombus, or was it rhomboid? Nothing parallel. No straight lines. Nothing vertical. Even the walls were built at 80 instead of 90 degrees. Maybe it was a parallel Buddhist universe after all. Everything was at a slight angle. Just as the Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy would have wished.

Hole in the wall

If the weather was good I could monitor the sun’s progress down the mountain while still in bed reading a book. I regarded that mountain as a very particular friend. It had a curving ridge like the prow of an old battleship. From the summit you could see K2 and the whole Karakoram, over 150 miles to the north. In between lay a vast ocean of mountains. To the west, the Nun Kun massif; to the east, Changtang; to the south, the peaks of Kishtwar. An unforgettable sight. A first ascent, no less. To climb a mountain for the very first time is a strange and exhilarating experience. Everything is fresh, even the view. A quiet feeling of euphoria. Success. Elation. Twenty minutes at the top, that is all. Cup of tea from a Thermos. Just time to build a small cairn. Then down before it gets dark.

Every morning sunlight made its long descent from the summit, down the various ridges and steep slopes. Sometimes painfully slowly, at other times in leaps and bounds. It was my hourglass and I could plot the progress of the sun until it reached the whitewashed walls of the Buddhist monastery. The sun then glided down across empty terraced fields to the village, which lay among the boulders of a vast terminal moraine.

Eventually the sun comes into the room, not through the window as you might suppose, but through a hole in the end wall where the door is. The door is made from three adzed planks of wood that are dowelled together, but like all Zangskari doors it is only three feet high and there is a sill of at least a foot over which you have to step. It saves on wood and draughts. There are cracks in the wood, and so I have put another hessian sack over the door that keeps the wind and snow out. The light is dappled, the hinges are leather. There is only a bent nail to keep it shut, so I lean some old wooden skis against it. These stop the wind blowing in and also keep out the dogs that roam the rooftops.

Next to the door is the end wall, and in it have been driven small wooden pegs for hanging up the family’s homespun cloaks. These are deep red or maroon, almost magenta, woollen and very warm. The cloaks were removed when I first arrived, but one peg came out and so there is a small hole in the wall. It is through this hole that the sun first appears, casting a diagonal shaft of silver light that slices through the dust and arrives on the opposite wall just above my shoulder, coming to rest on the green flowery chintz hanging. Normally I stop reading and watch its progress as the sun rises. It is as if I am a prisoner, but a willing one. That small shaft of light is a true delight.

Usually I find some matches and light a stick of incense, no easy matter with cold, stubborn fingers. I watch the blue smoke drift lazily around the room. It is another small part of the ritual, an offering to the local gods. And you have to keep the gods on your side. If the air is very still the smoke rises from the incense stick in a thin column that slowly widens rather like a silk stocking and then after rising a foot or two it forms very elegant ripples that get wider and wider. They curve and then invert and almost seem to catch up with each other before breaking out into turbulence, which has its own charm and elegance, as if mirroring the winds that sweep round the peaks. Indeed the smell of burning incense is an essential part of the rituals of this valley, and offerings to the local gods are vital on any journey or important occasion. The gods, like the mountains within which they live, are so much larger than oneself and have to be respected. Incense breeds humility and respect for the natural world.

So important was that first shaft of sunlight in the day that I never closed off the hole, even though it led outside to the bitter cold. It was somehow a direct connection with the world I had come to investigate. Each day had its own rhythm and insights. Slowly my mind became very quiet and alert. I became a silent observer, taking pictures in my mind. A language of images.

Only when the sun’s rays reached the window directly did the ice ferns begin their retreat, and within a few minutes it was as if they had never existed. The silver gallery evaporated but I knew it would return the next evening, like a friend or a secret lover. Returning again and again. Night after night. A visible sign, a talisman akin to the single flame of the candle that I would read by until the stars came out. You were in the hard grip of deep winter but you were also in the grasp of great beauty and deep silence. Winter cast its spell not just over the village but over the valley.

Time and solitude

During the winter I had no watch or any contact with the outside world, so there was no need for timekeeping in the normal sense. Time did not really exist. It was a mere fragment of its former self, measured in snowfalls and summer pastures, in fodder and the condition of animals, in the eyes of the people and the mood of the children, in the time it took to light a fire or milk a cow or shear a sheep or plough a small field or brew a pot of beer. These were real measures of time, and beyond that there was the time it took to walk to the next valley with a flock of sheep or a small herd of yak. Instead of saying to someone, ‘How old are you?’ they would simply say, ‘How many pastures have you seen?’ Such is the importance of the migration to the lush summer pastures. They might as well have said, ‘How many winters have you seen?’ or ‘How many yak do you own?’

Then there was Buddhist time and monastic time and the time it took to cremate a body. The time it took to walk to Lhasa and back or load a yak. The time to build a monastery, the time to grind up the rocks to make colours and the time to paint a vast Buddhist mural that would last a thousand years, the time to recite mantras and sutras, and the time to count the stars.

If you are not aware of time, then there is no sense of time passing and in a sense it is always time present. Distance is measured in days, winter in feet of snow, families in reincarnations. Life’s journey is always in three if not four dimensions. Time here is cyclical as well as linear. A Buddhist spiral, or is it a vortex? The mind, it seems, can go in two different directions at once, if not three. A black hole that receives your thoughts. What is then left? Where has the mind gone, and where is the thinker if there are no thoughts? There is a logic to it, repetitive like a mantra, but the deeper you go into the mantra, or the silence of snow, the more becomes apparent. Buddhist time is curious. On the one hand there is the Tibetan calendar that regulates the monasteries, festivals and times of prayer, governed by the phases of the moon. On the other hand there is philosophical and psychological time, which can be very elastic indeed, leading to Buddhist ‘emptiness’, where time ceases altogether.

Winter is a time of hunger, particularly if there is a late or particularly deep fall of snow. Wolves are common and snow leopards come down into the villages if they are hungry enough. There are many wolf traps up the valley. Life revolves around animals, the seasons and the river. In summer small glittering irrigation channels rely on meltwater from glaciers high above the villages. The monks play their part in keeping track of the seasons, as do the astrologers and medicine men, the amchis. Agricultural time has an important part to play.

In some villages, time is hereditary. Certain families will know the jagged mountain skyline so well that they will be able to predict when it is the right time to plough the fields by the way in which the sun rises. A skyline that is handed down from father to son. The whole village depends on their timing – if the timing is wrong and heavy snow comes, the whole crop is lost. Sometimes for reference they build cairns on a ridge or take bearings on certain buildings.

There is a time for harvest and a time for marriage, a time for the festivals and a time for rebirth. Time for children to grow up. Everything is related to everything else. Each village in the valley plays its part and all are joined together in ways that cannot always be seen. Generations have traded with one another, and animals are as much a part of their lives as their children. There are invisible threads of trade and marriage, exchange of seed grain and labour, a religious continuity that has its own pace and circular form.

Time is measured in silence and meditation in years. Buddhist time often takes the very long view and is akin to geological or even cosmic time. Maybe it is no coincidence that Zangskar is home to many yogins past and present, yet you cannot see them. They live in remote caves and are sometimes walled up on long retreat for three years, three months, three weeks and three days. Occasionally you may see a man high up on a ridge or a mountainside taking food to them, but that is all. Time is also measured in respect and gratitude. In such a valley a man who chooses to live alone is never lonely. There are always mountains and mountain spirits. Here there is complete freedom, though the air is rarefied. Your life is pitched between mountain and river. An offering.

Every day I go down to inspect the river by the bridge to see how much has frozen over, and I wonder about its own journey. I have to get to know the river in all its moods to understand its idiosyncrasies, its quirky beauty. I inspect the watering holes that are cut in the ice, the source of all the water for the village in winter. As winter progresses, the ice gets thicker and the holes get deeper. Young children have to use old tin cans to help fill the metal jerrycans. It is a long, laborious process, and then there is the walk of several hundred feet back up to the village. Their fingers and hands get very chapped. Rivers can move and so can the ice. Some nights you can hear it cracking.

Solitude, however, is not the same as isolation. Solitude is a virtue, a way of being content, a chosen path. Isolation is in effect an imposed loneliness. The two states are very different and yet they are linked. Isolation can enhance solitude, but it is not to everybody’s taste. Time and solitude both feed on silence. Silence has its own energy and you have to learn to harness it. Even the cold has its own echo, ice its own symphony.

I knew deep down that this kind of solitude was a rare commodity and one that I prized above all others. I was fully aware that I needed time to be myself. I also had a strange inner feeling of being on the threshold of something extraordinary. This was exploration in another dimension. Solitude. I had come a long way to taste its fruits. You can savour silence, you can breathe it in like savouring a fine wine, yet there is no delusion. Clarity of purpose and being becomes all the more obvious. Absolute silence, like absolute zero, is a state of mind.

1

The Road to Zangskar

November 1976

Zoji La

Mountains had been an important part of my life for many years. You visit them every so often and spend a few days with them. They become your friends. You think about them when they are not there. You talk about them with affection. You plan excursions around them. You travel long distances to see them. Slowly, they become part of your own character. Even mountain ranges become like extended families.

But such ambitious journeys as the frozen river do not come out of thin air. They are carefully planned. To get into the Zangskar valley by mid-November was a close-run thing. I had less than a week to get there and three passes to cross before the snow came down.

Down in Delhi airport at three in the morning the customs wallah looked at all my luggage and shook his head in disbelief. ‘Where are you going, Sahib? Ladakh, Sahib? Very cold, Sahib. Too much snow.’

Instead of searching all my baggage, which would have taken him half an hour, he simply marked every bag with a chalk cross, shaking his head in disbelief. Then he looked me straight in the eye. He had sussed me out and proudly gave his verdict, saying, ‘Back to nature.’

From Delhi I travelled Third Class on The Frontier Mail,1 a train that once ran all the way from Bombay to Peshawar on the North-West Frontier. From the station announcements I could just make out the route. ‘Platform Four – Panipat, Kanal, Ambala, Ludhiana, Jullundur, Amritsar.’ Chai wallahs everywhere. ‘Chai, chai, chai.’ Half a dozen porters in red loincloths and grubby turbans carried my luggage aloft on their heads, weaving in and out of the commuter crowds who were in turn besieged by wiry beggars. Third Class in the Punjab is an education. Seats hard, cramped and colourful.

In Amritsar I changed all my money in Grindlays Bank.2 An old Sikh bank guard in faded army uniform sat outside with a shotgun cradled across his knees. Inside, large fans gyrated slowly overhead in elliptical orbits. Piles of paperwork in triplicate were anchored down by large stones. I was given great wodges of 5 and 10 rupee notes an inch or two thick, stapled together, which I put into an old pillow case. I’d have the equivalent of £300 to last the whole winter. Then I took a branch line to Pathankot across the Punjab by steam train at night under a full moon, followed by a bus from Jammu. I crossed the Pir Panjal via the Banihal Pass (which was now a tunnel)3 and entered Kashmir.

There I visited the Tyndale Biscoe School,4 where the headmaster, Rev. John Ray, let me stay in the Church Mission School hostel. The hostel was run by one Chandra Pandit, whose father had once been a sirdar on K2. Chandra was a Brahmin Christian and liked bottled beer. There was always a crate behind the sofa. On his mantelpiece, hedging his bets, were both the Virgin Mary and Lord Krishna.

In the hostel I met two charming Ladakhi boys, sons of the Queen of Ladakh.5 Little did I realise it then, but I would help campaign on her behalf the following summer when she stood for parliament as the MP for Ladakh. What this involved was merely putting up a few posters with drawing pins on a stable door in a remote village at 14,000ft, perhaps the highest polling station in the world. Ladakhi boys were resourceful. Some of them even descended to Kashmir in January by sliding down the snowy slopes of the Zoji La6 – la is a ‘mountain pass’ – on their satchels, a bit like bobsleighing. Several thousand feet in one go. It takes some nerve and skill.

I bought supplies at Embee Stores in Srinagar bazaar to last me six months. That concentrates the mind. Bags of rice and atta (flour), tea, sugar, a large tin of biscuits, six round tins of Amul processed cheese, six tins of baked beans, Nescafé, milk powder, soap, soups, jars of jams (red, yellow and green, like traffic lights), peanut butter, salt, vermicelli, macaroni, jars of lime pickle, a five-kilo slab of tamarind known as imli, dark, bitter and sticky, a dozen tins of sardines caught in the Indian Ocean, twelve packets of dried soya ‘meat’, which I hated (for emergencies only), three tins of tuna, one for Christmas Day, one for New Year and one for my birthday, three tins of pineapple slices, a Dundee cake and a Christmas pudding, nutmeg, garam masala, chilli powder, turmeric, pepper, drinking chocolate, a bag of toffees, two dozen bars of Indian Bournville chocolate and one bottle of Bulldozer high-strength lager. This had a large macho bulldozer on the label, appropriate for road building. Only they had no bulldozers in Zangskar. No road yet.

But the road was certainly coming and indeed was well on its way. It had taken over ten years to reach Panikar and now it was slowly snaking its way over the Pense La. The road workers used picks and shovels – two men, one shovel. One with the handle, the other with a rope on the business end. They worked in synchronised motion. ‘All is pick and shovel.’ One dug, the other pulled to one side. Ingenious. Plus the occasional compressor to power pneumatic drills to cut holes in vast boulders prior to blasting. A long, slow process. But all the workmen had gone home for the winter to Nepal and Bihar.

There was one bottle of orange gin, as well as one bottle of XXX rum bought in Kargil, no doubt liberated from the army. That rum was a godsend. But only one bottle, which had to last six months. Emergencies only. The food would also have to last six months till the passes re-opened in June.

Added to all this were two large cardboard boxes filled with fruit: thirty-six red Himachal apples and thirty-six oranges. I had wrapped them individually in sheets of newspaper, copies of last week’s Times of India and Hindustan Times. News indeed, with Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency still in full swing.7 Journalists had to be careful what they wrote. Many were still banged up in prison, but the newspapers kept rolling just the same. Government propaganda in full swing too. ‘Foreign minister returned from Moscow’; ‘Mrs Gandhi to celebrate her fifty-ninth birthday with tribals in Guwahati’; ‘Tito sends his regards’.

My fruit ration allowed one item of fruit each day for seventy-two days, which would see me through the first half of winter. An attempt to stave off scurvy. The apples and oranges all froze upon entry in Ladakh as I crossed the Zoji La, as did the cabbages. So in Padum I thawed the fruit out beside the makeshift stove, while the cabbage was best attacked with a small saw. Even hard-boiled eggs froze. I also heated old batteries up on the stove to extend their life, but if they got too warm they would explode and send bits of hot graphite flying round the room like shrapnel. It concentrates the mind when you have to think six months ahead. Like being stranded on a desert island, only there were no palm trees, no coral reefs and it was decidedly colder.

After gathering my supplies, I then boarded the last bus of the year for Ladakh. It had required a visit to the chief of police to secure a seat. The ticket wallah told me that there were no seats – he then demanded 100 rupees extra up front as bakshish … which I did not have to spare. The whole expedition could have ground to a halt, so I got in a taxi and went to see the chief of police to make an official complaint. I just happened to mention Tyndale Biscoe and Mr Ray … in passing … and that did the trick. The very mention of John Ray’s name sorted everything out. The chief of police made a brief phone call, berated the man on the other end of the line, saying something about no room for ‘monkey business’ at this time of the year. He put the phone down and smiled. His charm had worked wonders. I was very grateful.

I was given the best seat on the bus, next to the driver.

My last telegram was sent from the small and delightful post office with its ‘rose beds and cosmos’ on the bund. ‘ZOJI LA OPEN LEAVING TOMORROW’.

Getting over the Zoji La to the frontier town of Kargil was only the beginning. I had to get into Zangskar before the passes closed. The snow was already late. I also had to find horsemen willing to cross the Pense La into Zangskar – roughly a week’s walking, which was cutting it very fine indeed. I could not waste a single minute.

We passed Dal Lake, shimmering in the early morning light, then wound up through cedar forests to Sonamarg. One passenger intrigued me. He wore army uniform, a red beret and looked Tibetan. He was a Khampa8 and belonged to the ‘22s’,9 a semi-official guerrilla unit that patrolled behind Chinese lines in Tibet. At one point they were supported by the CIA and operated though Mustang in Nepal, but the CIA had recently pulled the plug on them so they had regrouped in Ladakh and were operating under Ngari Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama’s younger brother. I had a letter of introduction to Ngari Rinpoche, but had just missed him in Dharamsala.

There are many stories about the Zoji La. The pass is often spoken about as if it is a living person, inspiring fear and admiration in the same breath. Some still call the pass the Shurji La after Shiva, the all-powerful Hindu god who creates, protects and transforms the universe. Shiva – god of destruction; highly appropriate if your vehicle goes over the edge.

Very slowly, army convoys crawl up the steep hairpin bends. You wait for hours and then it is like a rodeo, as gaily coloured trucks and overloaded buses jostle for position. Some lorries break down and are simply dragged to the side of the road. If brakes fail, that’s it. ‘Trust in God’ and military engineers. The pass is only open for half the year.

Below the road you could see the old trade route, just wide enough for two laden animals to pass and a single telephone line. There were stories of whole caravans being wiped out in late spring. The first caravans of the year always got the highest prices down in Kashmir. Avalanches were frequent and heavy. These days it was army convoys that got caught. Far below in the valley bottom you could see the mangled remains of several lorries and buses that had gone over the edge. In winter, snowploughs keep the pass open as long as possible. Road construction was a dangerous job and in these places close to the front line it was always undertaken by military engineers. All the way up there are wayside shrines and memorials to soldiers.

Early intimations

As the bus wound its way up the Zoji La my mind drifted a little, half tired, half hypnotised, almost in a dream state as the cedar trees flashed past and the views of snow-clad mountains opened out. I now had time to think about where my own journey had really started, where I was going and what I was looking for.

Travels often begin much earlier than you realise, usually in childhood. My grandfather, my mother’s father, was an excellent navigator and was on convoys in both wars. According to his small, slim, blue P&O diary, I was born at the beginning of a very cold spell in January 1954. His entries were sparse: ‘V Cold’; ‘VV Cold’. So my first inkling of the outside world was of a vast white landscape inhabited only by snow and ice. If the photographs are anything to go by, the trees were white with hoar frost. A magical entrée into a cold, glistening winter world.

I was then brought up on the western edge of Dartmoor in south-west England. A fine, wild place with its granite tors and bevy of fast-flowing rivers. When I was eight years old there was a very bad winter. Dartmoor was covered in snow and ice for three months, like a polar ice cap. Temperatures went down to -20°C and rivers froze.

I lived alongside one. School was cancelled and there was a slight feeling of anarchy. You could pick up quite bit of speed tobogganing down main roads on old fertiliser bags and tin trays. Farms and villages were cut off for weeks on end, even months.

Snow creaked underfoot. Rivers became like glaciers. The maps in our minds now had crevasses. Avalanches were common. Like Zen monks we entered a closed order, went up to the moor and observed its pale face, a vast moonscape upon which we walked slowly, like small gods. Silence and isolation were constant companions. Even the sea froze over.

These images became deeply embedded in my young mind, as if snow and ice were the natural order of things. The idea of being cut off from the outside world for half the year was therefore very appealing, a subconscious desire to return to that vast, white, endless space. If it involved mountains, even better. And so it was that the seeds of winter exploration were sown.

Wild places

But there were other layers of meaning, other images that sprang to mind. Other wild places that had original flavours, landscapes that were rugged, barren and untouched by human hand. It was the effect of the mountains on the mind that interested me most of all. Dangerous on your own or when caught out in bad weather. The beauty is within and without.

You lead a mountain life even when away from them. You are drawn to the mountains by their stark sculpture, their angular geology, the network of glaciers and snowfields. It is the nature of the rock that shapes them and gives them their individual topography. High-altitude ecology is very fragile. Certain zones can change with increased temperature, snowfall or over-grazing. Glaciers can retreat and some villages have had to be abandoned. It is something you feel within your bones. An unspoken understanding, a reverence, a deep respect.

I was also fascinated by rock in more immediate ways. By scaling cliff faces, clinging on by your fingertips, dancing on your toes, balancing on lips, cracks and ledges, struggling up chimneys, negotiating overhangs, seeking new routes up vertical walls. Rock climbing had its own strange satisfactions, but danger always lurked in your shadow. Sea-cliff climbing was a particular pleasure. I had several narrow escapes. Eventually rock climbing gave way to mountaineering.

I joined the army and signed on the dotted line for what was supposed to be a permanent career. They positively encouraged exploration. I was in the Royal Engineers, whose colonels, according to Kipling, were either ‘Methodist, married or mad’. Well, I wasn’t married or Methodist, so that left only one option. Scotland in winter had its interesting moments, ice gullies, ice climbing, blizzards and snow holing, crampons and ice axes. But deep down I needed a very different sort of challenge. Something timeless. In another dimension.

Travelling became a way of life. In their infinite wisdom the army posted me to Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean, and so each summer I travelled further east. My apprenticeship – first in Turkey, then Iran and then Afghanistan. Hugging borders, crossing mountain ranges and deserts, testing altitude. Testing myself. Nosing around bazaars and backstreets, finding nomads and their black tents, entering restricted areas, evading army patrols and customs posts. The Cold War hotting up. The Middle East, or, as James Joyce probably would have called it, ‘The Muddle East’.

I had tasted deep silence on Mount Ararat10 and in the Dasht-e-Lut – the Desert of Emptiness.11 Mountain silence and desert silence. One cold, one hot. Each had its own flavour. Such silence was addictive. On Ararat I was held up by Kurdish communist bandits at 13,000ft just below the snowline. They were on horseback and wore bandoliers and waistcoats, as well as Kurdish black and white chequered headdresses. A very different sort of silence when you realise that four carbines are trained on you.

A year later the army turned a blind eye and I crossed the Hindu Kush on foot, through Badakhshan and Nuristan. ‘A Long Walk in the Hindu Kush’. Newby territory. I was held hostage for two days by a local tribesman, then snow came down on the fifth pass and not for the first time I sensed the extraordinary power of winter in the mountains. It gave me ideas.

Unfortunately I also contracted typhus in Afghanistan – ‘Afghan fever’. Sweating hot and cold, semi-delirious at times. I was put in a darkened isolation ward all on my own with the blinds pulled down. When I was able to open my eyes again and my mind eventually settled, I started reading Walden – Henry Thoreau’s classic account of living beside a lake in Concord, Massachusetts. Walden was good for the soul, and slowly I began to see the world through different eyes. Why not take a leaf out of Thoreau’s book? Why not spend a year alone deep in the mountains? Afghanistan was a stepping stone. Fever the catalyst. Ladakh – a mountain desert.

In my letter of resignation to the army I mentioned something along the lines that ‘studying early Tibetan Buddhist wall paintings might be more useful than bridging on the Rhine …’. My contribution to the Cold War had not been very significant. The general was not amused, but to his credit my old adjutant was brilliant and managed to get me out of the army in three weeks flat, which was quite a record.12 But it cost me £1,946, no mean sum in those days.

Uncle Kenny

As the road climbed up the Zoji La, the pass became steeper and steeper and trees slowly began to peter out. The bus only just squeezed round each tight hairpin bend. As I looked over the edge, I began thinking about Uncle Kenny, an eccentric uncle whose family had been out in India for four or five generations. He was something of a legend, and it was his colourful stories of India that had drawn me inexorably further east.

Earnest and brilliant, Uncle Kenny’s knowledge and enthusiasm for Indian art was infectious. He was one of those uncles who with a deft flick of his freckled hand talked in secretive whispers about the Great Game on the North-West Frontier. He had been born at a hill station at the beginning of a particularly early and tempestuous monsoon, and was ‘milk brothers’ to Pathan tribesmen. He always saw India from the inside. Eccentric even by Indian army standards, he was a man of many layers, quixotic, highly intelligent and brusque. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, but if he liked you and you were keen on your subject and asked the right questions, the doors of the ‘Wonder House’ began to open one by one.

When I was twelve I wanted to be an archaeologist and had already been on a dig. So my grandmother had a natter down the telephone line to her sister in Kent and arranged for Uncle Kenny to give me a conducted tour of the British Museum. K de Burgh Codrington was a real live professor and for many years he had also been Keeper of the Indian section at the V&A. I thought being a keeper was like a timekeeper, goalkeeper or a zookeeper, which was not far off the mark. He had indeed looked after one old Bengal tiger, ‘Tippu’s Tiger’, a French-inspired mechanical wooden tiger captured at Seringapatam in south India. When you turned a handle, the tiger growled as it mauled an East India man, who let out a plaintive, muffled scream. Pride and joy of the V&A. Très jolie.

Uncle Kenny was indeed a keeper. He kept time with India. He kept India under his cloak and up his sleeve. He kept the flame of Indian artistic knowledge alive in London with wonderful exhibitions that helped change people’s perceptions of Indian art. He loved museums and was also an avid keeper of secrets.

We met at the entrance to the BM, as the grown-ups called it, with all its pillars and capitals. Uncle Kenny looked me up and down as if I were a recruit for Lumsden’s Guides or Hodson’s Horse. He shook my paw and took me on a whistlestop tour of all the ancient carvings and Buddhist statues, pointing out any artefacts that came under his gaze, all the time telling me not ‘What they knew’ but ‘What they did not know’. A revelation to me that ‘grown-up’ knowledge had black holes in it. Sometimes he would stand in front of a Buddhist statue and just absorb its beauty, then touch the statue gently as if it were a real person and move on with a slight nod of his head. These were his friends, colleagues and inspiration. This was his office, his temple, his spiritual home.

Then Uncle Kenny took me upstairs, where there were other smaller statues: gold and bronze Tibetan Buddhas and even a small, squat crystal goose from the ancient city of Taxila, thought to contain a small bone relic of the Buddha.13 The goose flying over the mountains, a migratory path so beloved of Buddhists to the lake beyond, the flight path of the soul.

So before going to Ladakh I visited Uncle Kenny in his lair. Lunch, roast chicken. Rose Cottage, Appledore, on the edge of Romney Marsh. This time he was sorting through a great pile of Kushana coins that lay scattered on his table, with elegant Kharoshti script that danced around the Greek heads. Uncle Kenny had pepper and salt hair and a large pair of professorial horn-rimmed glasses. He spoke in sentences and half sentences. He showed me another small Buddha head. It left a deep impression. Peaceful, wise, intelligent, aristocratic, refined. The fusion of early Buddhist sculpture with Greek aesthetics; ancient Gandhara, the ‘perfumed land’ – a sacred place in his heart. He was always talking about Taxila, Peshawar and Kapisa, names of ancient cities that started to reverberate around my mind.

Uncle Kenny’s ears pricked up when he heard that I was going to Ladakh. In spring 1942 he had tried to climb the Zoji La at night with guides, porters and burning torches. There was no road, only a slender track. He was optimistic and wanted to see the ancient Buddhist wall paintings at Alchi beside the Indus. But Shiva had other ideas and hampered his attempt to cross the pass. There had been a heavy fall of snow, and the avalanches were unpredictable and dangerous. Eventually in the early hours, when up to his waist in powder snow, he had reluctantly turned back.

Uncle Kenny’s deep interest in Tibetan Buddhism had been sparked by a chance encounter as a boy in Simla when he saw a Tibetan salt trader in a rough woollen cloak squatting down outside Viceregal Lodge flanked by two British sergeants. Something was rather odd about the salt trader. He looked very refined, had long fingernails and pointed ears. When Kenny asked who he was, one of the sergeants replied, ‘That, Sah, is the Dalai Lama.’ His Holiness had fled Tibet to India to escape the attentions of the Chinese and was in secret talks with the British Viceroy. Must have been the 13th Dalai Lama in about 1910.

A rare historical moment as they both looked at each other …

My ‘task’ was therefore to continue Uncle Kenny’s journey into Ladakh, to explore the culture, to decode Zangskar and to decipher the language of silence. That was quite a challenge. Creating a museum of the mind. To record as best I could a living Buddhist culture with a continuous thread going back to the time of Gandhara. That was the sort of challenge I was looking for.

When I left Appledore, Uncle Kenny wished me luck and simply said, ‘Beware avalanches.’ He shook my paw. I had been given my marching orders.

Dried apricots

The summit of the Zoji La was an anti-climax – a few scrappy buildings, a toll barrier and an army snowplough detachment. Sikh engineers stood around in green padded jackets and dark blue turbans, just waiting to get their snowploughs stuck in. They banged their hands together and stamped their feet. Snow swirled around ominously.

Paperwork was checked and tolls paid. Eventually the Sikh sergeant raised the red and white barrier, waving us through, then brought the bar back down again with a clang. We were in. The doors were shutting one by one. The password was no word at all. The Tibetan Khampa smiled as he looked out of the bus window. He was coming home to his family – Tibetan Buddhist territory that he understood.

Next day in the town of Kargil, right on the Pakistani front line, I bought ten kilos of dried apricots, each kilo of wizened nuggets carefully weighed out on a hand-held balance with a single smooth, rounded stone salvaged from the river in the other pan.14 Old-style weights and measures. Brass pans. Equilibrium. Each kilo tipped into a small, dusty hessian sack. Apricots, gemstones of the mountains. Rich flavours of summer. Orange tinged with red. Blushing. Apricot oil was used in lamps. Medicine. Gives a good sheen to dark hair and is rubbed onto the skin when hands become chapped with cold. I was interested in the taste. A rich, complex sweetness that filters through your mouth. Anchors you into warmer times. Best soaked the night before and then warmed up.

Apricot wood is also used for musical instruments. In China the expression ‘expert of the apricot grove’ is used to refer to a good physician. Apricots are used in traditional Tibetan amchi medicine. Almost as sacred as juniper. Ten kilos of apricots would last me most of the winter, I reckoned. Useful down the frozen river. Luxury.

Kargil was a key town strategically.15 In the old days you could go north to Skardu and Baltistan. But since Partition in 1947 it had been the scene of bitter fighting. In three wars the town had changed hands several times. It was even said that soldiers in the Pakistani OP (observation point) on the mountain that overlooked the town could, with a powerful pair of binoculars, see what the Indian brigadier was having for breakfast on the veranda of his army bungalow down by the river. A masala omelette and a chapatti or two, washed down with masala chai, this information no doubt relayed to the generals in Rawalpindi for analysis. One day the Indians put in an airstrike, followed by an uphill assault to reclaim the OP so that the brigadier could enjoy his breakfast in peace.

To get to Suru I took a lorry. There had been a very hard frost that morning, and to get the engine started the boy lit a fire with straw under the sump to get the sluggish oil moving and the engine turning over. Eventually the diesel spluttered into life. I travelled in the back with my baggage, a few goats and thirty men standing on sacks of flour. I hung on for dear life. This valley had once been Buddhist. Near Sanku, there was still a tall Buddha statue.

Six hours and forty miles later, after many halts, the lorry arrived at the roadhead – Panikar. I offloaded my possessions and watched the lorry going back down the valley, changing gear as it negotiated stream beds and rode over large ruts. I listened intently, maybe for half an hour, as the engine noise became fainter and fainter, slowly receding until it disappeared altogether. The silence that followed had such extraordinary depth and breadth to it. You could almost touch it. This was what I had come for. Then the dust storm hit.

The roadhead

Walking into Zangskar from Panikar in the middle of November on the very edge of winter presented its own problems. It is still a hundred-mile walk to Padum, but it felt more like a hundred years. At night I kipped out in the engineer’s compound, sleeping on the concrete floor of an open lean-to shed, surrounded by all the baggage I had brought up from Kashmir – two large hampers, half a dozen hessian sacks, an assortment of bags and holdalls, two sets of skis and snowshoes, ice axes and crampons, as well as two hurricane lanterns and a Primus stove.

The local teacher helped me to find horses. To get horsemen to go to Padum on the edge of winter was not easy. They had worked on caravans all summer and were exhausted. I needed four horses. For two days we walked from village to village asking anybody we saw, without success. There were many excuses, all of which were valid.

It was too cold

Horses had been worked all summer.

Snow might come at any time

Snow on the pass was often very deep.

It was too far

There was no grazing.

The men were tired

Horses were tired.

Horses needed shoeing

They needed extra grain.

The men were wary

Their wives did not want them to go.

What if there was a blizzard?

Men had died on the pass.

What if they were trapped in Zangskar?

What then?

What if the horses were trapped

Who would pay for fodder?

How would they even get fodder?

It was too late in the year.

Where would they stay?

There were wolves.

There were bears

There were snow leopards.

There had been trouble in Zangskar

Some kind of uprising.

Rumours that people had been killed

That is what they are saying.

It is too cold

None of them want to go.

In the end, I negotiated directly with two brothers in their forties, Fazal Din and Jamal Din. We agreed a price, based on double the government rate because their return journey would be unladen.16 It seemed reasonable enough in the circumstances as it was a seven-day journey: seven days there and seven days back, which made a journey of fourteen days. If they did the journey quicker then they kept the extra money, which was a good incentive. Fifteen rupees to the pound.

The government rate was 25 rupees a day per horse.

4 horses @ 25 rupees a day = 100 rupees a day for 14 days = 1,400 Rs

2 men @ 10 rupees a day with double allowance for the cold = 280 Rs

Grand total = 1,680 Rs

I paid them an advance. Their wives watched intently as the men counted the money and then handed it over to them. The men now had to get the horses shod and fed with barley. We would leave the next day in the afternoon.

A grave situation

In between these negotiations I went to find two graves in a willow grove at the back of the village. The teacher had tipped me off. The first was an army officer’s, a fine sarcophagus:

IN EVER LOVING MEMORY OF HERBERT W. CHRISTIAN

CAPTAIN KING’S ROYAL RIFLES FIFTH SON OF GEORGE AND MARY CHRISTIAN BIGHTON WOOD ALRESFORD ENGLAND DIED OF FEVER AT SURU MAY 21ST 1896 AGED 29

A corner of a foreign land that was forever Hampshire, with magnificent views of the Nun Kun massif. His regiment, the 60th Rifles, had been involved in the Relief of Chitral, a small beleaguered fortress right up on the Afghan border. He had used his leave to hunt ibex and markhor.

The other grave was that of a Ladakhi Christian, his name carved on a slate slab about eighteen inches square. Simple and minimalist.

IN LOVING MEMORY

OF SC GERGAN

LEH LADAKH BORN

29 12 1900 KILLED

BY KUTH RAIDERS

AT PENTSE LA AGED 29 ON

14. 6. 1929 WHILE ON DUTY

Both men, I noticed, were twenty-nine when they died. I had no intention of joining them just yet. As I was only twenty-two, it gave me seven years’ grace.

The Gergans were well known. Back down in Srinagar in Sonwar bazaar I had met Sonam Skyabldan Gergan, Chimed Gergan’s brother, and he told me the story. Chimed had been a forest and game officer for the Maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir. The previous summer he had apprehended some Kishtwari smugglers of kuth, a valuable plant found on the Pense La. Kuth had a high value as it was used as a drug, dye and medicine. Gergan confiscated their haul and took them down to Kargil to see the magistrate as they had evaded customs duties, but they managed to bribe their way out of trouble. The next year they were not afraid of Gergan, so when he tried to re-arrest them they simply knifed him, left him on the pass to die and fled back to Kishtwar.

After this tragic death, Sonam Skyabldan Gergan was given his brother’s job and was able to check up on all his father’s historical observations about the history of Ladakh. His father, Joseph Gergan, had helped translate the Bible into Ladakhi for the Moravian missionaries. When I told Mr Gergan that I was going to Zangskar for the winter he looked at me quizzically and simply said, ‘Is that wise?’

Snuff and silver horse bell

In the mountains you were always judged by the amount of baggage you had and the number of pack animals. In the summer some caravans had a hundred horses. That was very respectable. A large caravan on the move had a wonderful rhythm and life all of its own. Now my own small caravan from Suru was made up of two horsemen and four horses. So in the eyes of the village I was only a four-horse wallah.

Loading was simple. First, rough horse blankets were slung over the backs of the horses to cushion the load and prevent chafing sores, then homemade wooden pack saddles were secured in place. Next, the girth strap, which was only two strands of rope, was tightened several times. While this was going on, the packhorses were given nosebags full of barley and chaff. Loading all the horses took at least half an hour each morning, often before dawn when your fingers were at their coldest. You got going as quickly as possible.

Each load was carefully organised, weighed and balanced. Each day the horses had the same load, and if the load slipped at any point on the journey they simply stopped and waited for the two horsemen to readjust and tighten the load. Everyone knew what they were doing. It was often far too cold to talk.

Day one. We set out in the middle of the afternoon and began to walk towards the fine snow-capped pyramid of Nun, which at 23,500ft was the highest peak for many miles. An elegant curved plume of spindrift was blowing off the summit, the speed of the jet stream probably in excess of 100 mph, icy winds that sooner or later would come down to the valley floor.

As we walked along the path beneath the mountain there was complete silence. The streams were all frozen – just the odd gurgle coming from beneath the ice. Icicles hung down from overhangs, cliffs and crevices. The road had its own path and we simply followed, not speaking a word. We knew the risks. We were just glad to get going and bask in what was left of the afternoon sunshine.

The Nun Kun massif towered above us, a wonderfully cosmopolitan mountain group that attracted climbers of many different nationalities: British and Nepalese as well as American, Italian, French and Swiss. These mountains were worshipped by the local villagers, who thought that foreign mountaineers were climbing to find God. Why else go to those lengths or heights? Maybe they were right. God was always over the next ridge. But then if there were many mountains, surely there must be many gods, not just one?

The packhorses moved in line ahead slowly but surely, pacing along the unmade road. On dried-up river beds small mushrooms of dust emanated from their hooves. Occasionally they jockeyed for position, but often they were content to go at their own measured pace. Very soon the rhythm of the caravan took hold of us and we settled down, as all caravans do. The sort of pace you could keep up for weeks on end.

In front was Fazal Din with the leading rein. He smoked cigarettes through a clenched fist. He took a deep breath every few paces and was almost in a trance. The other horseman, Jamal Din, at the rear, chewed naswar, Afghan snuff, and every so often exuded a long jet of green spittle that congealed in the dust.17 In the Hindu Kush I had seen the effect of opium on porters. It delayed their progress by hours, even days, as they slowly lost track of time or where they were going. Every man has his poison.

I can still smell the caravan, an earthy, pungent smell that reeks of warm horse, sweat, leather and straining muscles. Even in sub-zero temperatures it had a certain je ne sais quoi – a musky stable odour of horse dung with a bit of hay and fodder thrown in for good measure. Eau de cheval. Wolves would have picked the scent up many miles away on the cold wind and licked their lips.

The packhorses stood patiently every morning, waiting to be loaded. Three were brown or bay – the fourth was black. They all had a white blaze on their foreheads, a makeshift bridle and leading rein. They say that Zangskari horses are some of the toughest in the world, second only to Yarkandi horses. They can carry loads and even people over the main Karakoram Pass at over 18,000ft, and the Indian army often used them for the resupply of troops at high altitude.

The relief of walking was enormous. And then out of the silence came the sound of a bell approaching us. Clear and insistent – a silver horse bell. The horse was ridden at a trot by a red lama. Over the saddle was an ornate Tibetan saddle rug with dragons and snow lions. An imposing man with a broad, bronzed face and good stirrups. A fine and inspiring sight. The lama passed without a word, but smiled and raised his hand. It was as if he were in meditation. These mountains have that effect on you without you even thinking.

The sound of the bell was so clear that it stayed with me for several hours. The pace of the horse and demeanour of the rider were so very different to ours. He was probably a monastery manager making his way back to Leh before the snows came. Just a silver horse bell, and yet the space within which it rang seemed so vast.

Parkachik glacier

Sleeping outside was positively parky, -15°C, sometimes -20°C. First night, a field beyond Parkachik. I sheltered behind the hampers. Making tea was not easy as water had to be gleaned from small streams that only flowed under the ice for a few hours a day. The ice axe came into its own.

All during that first night, as I lay on the frozen earth, I could hear the glacier creaking and groaning to itself as it slowly crept down the slopes of Nun Kun towards the cold green waters of the Suru river. The Parkachik glacier is over eight miles long and sounded like some wild animal turning over in its sleep, stretching and yawning. A wild beast that fed off avalanches. Its snout came right down into the water.

Day two. We set off before dawn. A crescent moon, pale amid the stars. I watched as a 100ft pinnacle of ice hovered, teetered and then toppled into the water in slow motion. Hardly a splash, just a ripple reaching out. The glacier once came right across the river. In the past this was the beginning of Buddhist territory and grazing rights. Somewhere nearby there was a rock inscription in Tibetan that demarcated the boundary of Rangdom. Invisible boundaries of influence and ideas. It was difficult to tell where autumn ended and winter began. Fluid frontiers.

The Suru river was clear, green and sedate. Ice floes from the glacier were joined by thousands of other smaller ones from upstream. A continuous process, and fascinating to watch. Ice in another dimension, like ice ferns but on a vast scale. The freezing-up of a large Himalayan river was a long and tedious process that took many months. Yet few people witnessed it. Sometimes great sheets of ice formed in the shallows and froze over. But the river level often changed. If the sun shone for a day or two, the glaciers would melt a bit and the river would rise, and if it was very cold the side streams froze up and the river level fell. The ice sheets would then collapse, break up and flow downstream. A continuous process of ice forming and breaking, ice being carried downstream. Hundreds of ice floes were on the move. A dignified procession. And the green of the river not dissimilar to the one green pane of glass in my room, only a slightly darker shade.

When there was deep, still water, the river froze right over and then you heard the eerie scraping noise as all the ice floes invisibly passed underneath, dragged along by the current. But it would be quite a while before you could walk on the ice. The river in winter was alive, organic and took its time to freeze.

In the upper reaches of the Suru valley I had the distinct feeling of being in no man’s land, limbo, trapped between two very different worlds. A strange zone with few, if any, signs of habitation, as if passing from one country to another, from one language, belief system and philosophy to another more colourful, expansive world. This was like walking on thin air down a vast mountain corridor wracked with harsh, cold winds, low cloud and occasion snow flurries. Very occasionally peaks could be glimpsed. All unclimbed, apart from the twin summits of Nun Kun. All beckoning. Maybe the mountains talked to each other. Maybe the glaciers had a language of their own, crevasses their own code of practice. Humans were almost superfluous unless they meditated.

The more I walked, the more the mountain silence began to penetrate my bones and my way of thinking. If you looked carefully there were many different zones, all related to altitude, grazing and snowline. Near the villages were the zones of farmers, then the zones of shepherds and yak herders, and the more subtle Buddhist zones of monasteries, monks and nuns, where meditators spent weeks, even years, surveying the peaks and glaciers. It was this last zone that interested me most of all. Zangskar beckoned from afar.

As the path began to rise towards the yellowy light of dawn I caught sight of movement far below. Unusual … a figure, a man who crossed the river above a waterfall with a bundle of dried grass strapped to his back. Quite where he had come from I could not make out, or even where he was going, but he must have been out there all night.

And then he came up towards the road and I saw that our paths would cross. He was cheerful, despite being very cold, and had taken his rough homespun trousers off to cross the river. His legs were still bare and dripping; in his cummerbund, stowed away, a small sickle about six inches across. We greeted him warmly and I marvelled at his tenacity. I was put in mind of Matsuo Basho, the famous Japanese haiku poet, and his observations on Japanese peasants in his Narrow Road to the Deep North.18 I felt as if I were on my own narrow road, only I was going south and east not north. But our feelings about winter were the same. This unkempt but cheerful man was on a voyage all of his own. There were no villages up here and what he was doing was something of a mystery.

Only an old man clutching a sickle –

Drops of water – dried grass

Silvery beneath the crescent moon

His cloak covered in patches.

Feet and legs bare

Shades of things to come.

We passed like ships in the night. His greeting a handshake. His smile infectious. More than anything else this cheerful old man and his small parcel of fodder strapped to his back told me about the precariousness of their lives. Here every blade of dried grass counted. Maybe he was searching for an animal, like the famous ox-herding pictures used in Zen teachings, or returning from a trip over the other side of the mountains leading a yak or dzo for sale. You never knew how long winter was going to last. It was always a gamble.

Boundary of Buddhism

Sometimes where a stream crossed the road, it froze over into a great ice sheet maybe a hundred yards long. Each horse was gently coaxed across. We dug out frozen earth with a stick and scattered it on the ice so their hooves could get a grip. A broken leg up here would have been a disaster, for a horse could not survive the night. And if we lost one horse, the other three could not carry the extra load. Slowly I began to admire the horses’ tenacity. They were bred in Zangskar, so in a sense they were going home.

Usually we stopped around midday for an hour. With three pieces of dried yak dung you can make a good fire set between three stones. If it was dry it broke with a crack. There was often no firewood, just scrub. Dried dung from the summer’s grazing was essential. No fire – no warm food.

At one point we passed three small lakes that were so still they reflected the mountains perfectly. Half frozen over. Each line, like a ripple, led right round the pond, a night’s frost creeping out from the shore, an inch, then six inches, then a foot, then several feet at a time, until, like the previous night, it covered half the lake, the contours in the ice like tree rings recording the frost’s nocturnal advances. The following night it would freeze over completely. At one point I looked back at the Nun Kun peaks and saw a great rock face towering over the valley. Even from twenty miles it looked magnificent.

After the second day’s long march I saw the first prayer flags. The boundary of Buddhism, a psychological, social, linguistic and religious frontier. This was where Zangskar really began. From now on I was in Buddhist territory and despite the cold wind it felt very different. I felt like I was coming home and repeated the odd mantra under my breath. I sensed a degree of protection, as if the local gods were now on my side. Buddhists left nothing to chance.

Scores of prayer flags were strung out from long, thin willow poles anchored into small cairns. They are usually found on the summits of passes or at other key points on the journey such as river crossings. It is where the spirit of the pass or the mountain or the village resides. A place of offering and worship.

These flags were faded and fluttered in the cold, dry wind, each colour symbolising a particular Buddhist idea or element. Yellow is earth, green is water, red is fire, white is wind and blue is outer space. Five elements instead of four. On each cotton flag there were mantras and Buddhist prayers. A wind horse is often printed in the centre, special horses (lungta) that carry the prayers galloping on the wind. In each corner there are mythological creatures: a Garuda bird – wisdom; the dragon – gentle power; the Tibetan snow lion – fearlessness and joy; the tiger – confidence. This was a complex spiritual world, a potent mixture of Tibetan Buddhism and shamanic, pre-Buddhist folk beliefs still very important in the mountains, particularly when the elements are unpredictable. Compassion and inner strength transmitted on the wind.

These prayer flags are often hand printed from old wood blocks that have seen many seasons. Flags are replaced at certain times of year by local villagers and they have a distinct psychological effect, as if harnessing the powers of nature. A powerful political and territorial statement, for although the path gets tougher and the altitude higher, at least you know that you are on Buddhist soil at long last.

You have entered the land of Buddha’s teaching, where following the path to enlightenment is the aspiration of many. Indeed, the word for Buddhists is simply nangpa – the ‘insiders’. It means they are inside the teaching, and that they are seeking the solutions to existence and philosophy and life’s perplexing questions within the very nature of mind itself, a radical quest based on long experience of silence and inner common sense.

Nangpa is not to be confused with nan pa, which means bar-headed goose, the species that flies over the main Himalayan range twice a year on migration. They breed in Ladakh and the lakes of Tibet, then fly over the Himalaya to winter on the wetland areas of north India, reversing the journey in spring. They have been seen flying close to very high mountains – even over Everest – and are very strong flyers indeed. One Tibetan source says, ‘You cannot see the summit from nearby, but you can see the summit from nine directions and a bird that flies as high as the summit goes blind.’19 Maybe the geese are temporarily snowblind.

Geese are mentioned many times in Buddhist teachings to symbolise the mind’s migration and the wisdom of non-attachment, as well as being a metaphor for enlightenment, which is ‘like a goose arriving at a great lake’.

Mantra

Having passed the first prayer flags we camped for the second night beside the track, sleeping out rough as always. We had collected twigs and dried yak dung as we walked. To make lighting a fire easier, small pieces of dried horse dung were soaked in kerosene and then ignited. You knelt down and blew till the fire took. Another trick was not to camp anywhere near a village. All the firewood and scrub would have been collected and there would be little or no grazing at this time of year. The villagers needed every scrap of fuel they could find.

That second night we slept out in what must have been a summer grazing camp with low walls. Darkness came quickly to our shivering fingers. Lighting stoves and using matches became a major preoccupation. Tying bootlaces and doing up buttons became a chore. The stubbornness of numb fingers lingered in your mind, for without your fingers you can do nothing. Not even strike a match.

The stillness was remarkable. Only the odd noise of horses moving from foot to foot as they slept standing upright in among the rocks. Our breath froze. No one else was on the move in the mountains at this time of year. The snow was already a month late, so we were cutting it very fine indeed. The frosts were unbelievably hard.

Boiling point is always lower at high altitude – pressure cookers are useful when cooking rice, so long as they don’t explode – and mountaineers use the boiling-point temperature as a guide to height. There were graphs that could be used to measure the altitude. Roughly speaking, at 13,000ft the boiling temperature would be about 87°C, which made tea less appetising and porridge a little gloopy, and you lost 1°C for every thousand feet you climbed. So at 20,000ft your tea would boil at roughly 80°C. A good rule of thumb. I had my own altimeter in a leather case and wore it round my neck. I consulted it every day. It was my compass, my lucky charm, my amulet.

On the third day I saw the first Buddhist monastery, perched on its lone rock far away in the distance. Here was something to aim for, a navigational aid, but in the end we took a short cut to one side. The main building was whitewashed but the Temple of the Guardian Deities (the Gonkhang) at the rear was red, which made a great contrast. This was Rangdom Gompa, a Gelugpa monastery, yellow-hat followers of Tsongkhapa, the great 14th-century sage.20

The valley opened out into a vast flood plain, barren in winter but with a great sense of freedom. Five valleys meant five winds and five rivers. The monastery stood alone on its great rock, a wonderful spectacle but also cold, desolate and dusty. There were two villages: Zhuldok, the nearer one, and Tashi Tanze, tucked away on the other side of the monastery.

In November you walk on borrowed time. In Zhuldok I counted about twenty houses, roofs all heavily laden with neatly stacked fodder and firewood, ready for a long winter. The houses were not crammed together but separate, about thirty yards apart. Windows were larger than those down in Suru. More wood, more glass, more windows, more prosperous, their main wealth coming from selling horses, cattle and yaks in the autumn.

There were also fewer people. Monkish celibacy and fraternal polyandry saw to that, although I was never quite sure how the women felt about it with two or even three husbands. But in the Buddhist world women can only inherit land if there are no brothers. They are then in a very strong position, and can even hire and fire husbands if they want. It often depended on the size of their landholding and how many workers they needed. Arrangements seemed to be very flexible. Some men had two wives. Some women had two husbands. Divorce was not uncommon. Then there were nuns. As a culture they had learnt to keep the population down. The land can only support so many, and in winter food becomes scarce. Who can predict how long a winter will last? Instinct, intuition and ancient customs have a way of keeping you on the straight and narrow.

Om mani padme hum

In Zhuldok each house was daubed with the mantra Om mani padme hum, six syllables invoking wisdom and the inner path.21 They also had a line of red dots along the wall at waist height to keep the ghosts and evil spirits away, and the odd red triangle daubed on the corners of the house – Buddhism and Central Asian shamanism in one convenient package. Even wooden windows were outlined in ochre and black to give them a greater presence. The windows were the eyes of the house.

Heady stuff early in the morning. Om mani padme hum. Not a bad mantra to be walking to, repeated softly under one’s breath, each step a syllable.

Wind horse

Outside one house a woman leaned out wearing a perag, her headdress covered in rough-cut turquoise. She offered me a jug of yogurt that she had just made, saying, ‘Dun, dun, dun’ (‘Drink, drink, drink’). It was the old rule of travelling, a curious friendship that exists between those who are on a journey and those they pass. And yet I was a stranger in winter. I accepted the yogurt willingly. Such generosity.

The yogurt had a smoky flavour a bit like peat smoke, which gave it a fine edge. It was sharp. How they keep their yogurt cultures alive in the winter was remarkable. Yaks stood around the village loitering and were then driven off to some last patch of grazing by a young girl with a long willow wand.

All over Ladakh and Tibet the mantra Om mani padme hum is repeated thousands and thousands of times every day in monasteries, on prayer wheels, in private contemplation, fluttering on the prayer flags in the carved stones and in the murmured repetitions that accompany every walk of life. Then there are the 100,000 prostrations that can take several months to complete. In Phuktal Gompa I once saw an old but very fit man doing his prostrations on a wooden board. He had small white pebbles that he moved every time he completed ten, then a hundred, then a thousand. I think he did a thousand prostrations a day, so it would have taken him a hundred days. Sometimes pilgrims prostrated themselves full length along a road or path, mile upon mile. Humility itself.

There was also a small wind-driven mani wheel on the roof corner of the first house in Zhuldok, and later I saw small water-driven prayer wheels that went round and round, the Buddhist universe endlessly sending out good prayers and invocations. We would need many mantras to take us over the pass before the snow came down. It was still a very long way and the snowline crept ever lower on the mountainside.

When chanting Om mani padme hum, it was extraordinary to think that millions of people across the Tibetan Buddhist world were also chanting this simple ‘prayer’, invoking not only compassion but emptiness itself. It felt as if we were walking into the void. Form and emptiness, mountains and the feeling of infinite space. To hear the mantra chanted by a hundred monks in a monastery is extraordinary, the young boy monks very high, almost squeaky, and the old monks who have seen seventy winters or more, very deep, low and sonorous, their faces dark and gnarled like old walnuts. The internal rhythms take the mind into very calm regions, the repetition possessing a strange healing power that cannot easily be explained.

Then there were chortens dotted along the way, otherwise known as stupas, squat Buddhist structures in various phases of collapse, a bit like vast pawns from a chess set dotted about the landscape.22 Whitewashed once a year, they also embody teaching in a symbolic way, sometimes containing the remains of holy men or small moulded clay Buddhas (tsa tsa) made with ash from cremations.

As I left Zhuldok I passed a group of three chortens representing the three Buddhas, past, present and future. Plenty of philosophy to chew upon. Chortens are quite complex – the square base represents earth, the dome represents water, the spire on top represents fire, which transforms life into ashes. Then on top of that a parasol and crescent moon which represent air and a sun which represents outer space, i.e. aether. Five elements instead of four. Some chortens are small, others large.

We then cut across old marshes that in summer were a haven for wildfowl, but the water table had sunk and what was left of the water remained as ice, frozen into small waves, an undulating silvery sheen of ice crystals. Maybe a quarter of a mile of silver-coated sand, like a shoal of small, silvery fish. The ice crystals crunched underfoot. The surface was ruffled and ruckled into small waves blown by the wind and frozen almost instantaneously. Sastrugi.23 Windblown.

Cold and dry, with four valleys funnelling the winds towards us, Rangdom Gompa with its red and white walls sat sedately on top of its rock, commanding the whole valley. The morning light was not bad at all.

For some reason when I was walking behind the horses, a few jumbled lines from T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land came to me, about shadows and red rocks, shelter, fear and handfuls of dust, which seemed appropriate, though I thought it unlikely Eliot would have ventured so deep into the mountains at this particular time of year … in this particular weather, with these particular horses. It was indeed a wasteland in winter, yet it had great power. Emptiness beckoned. Heavy-duty dust storms lurked round the corner.

An hour later on the right-hand side of the monastery I saw a remarkable sight. It must have been a mile away at first, but in the high-altitude air the light plays tricks and what looks near is often far away. A small dust cloud moving quite fast and then, as the cloud got closer, I saw a lone monk wearing a yellow hat and a red cloak riding fast out across the valley. He came towards us and passed within several hundred yards, but was intent on his own journey. I could again hear the silver horse bell ringing, a clear, insistent tone that carried far. The monk was strong and his horse seemed to understand the urgency of his mission. No one undertook such journeys at this time of year unless they were absolutely necessary. Here was a messenger with an important message.

The silver horse bell in that clear air was hypnotic in its intensity and the bell kept pace with the horse’s hooves. This was no time to hang around. The horse moved at a fast trot, not a canter, a pace that the horse could keep up for hours on end. The monk cut across the valley with the wind behind him and rode up the steep cobbled path towards the monastery. As he did so the vast wooden gates of the monastery slowly opened and swallowed him whole. Here was a real live wind horse. The poetry was in the dust and the red rock from which he sought shelter.

I knew then that I had crossed a boundary, that the mind and the mountains were very closely linked. There was certainly no turning back now. The mountains were flexing their muscles. Snow beckoned.

Ice quartet

Sometimes we had to cross icy rivers barefoot, taking off boots, socks and trousers, wading in up to our thighs. No easy matter, but essential. Sharp stones cut my feet and after a while they went numb. I carried a towel in the top of my rucksack so that feet could be dried off and rubbed back into some form of circulation. Frostbite was never far away. Not all rivers freeze over, and if you do have to cross, choose a place where the water is shallow, take a strong stick and lean into the current.

The horses took the rivers in their stride but they often had problems getting out because of the ice on the far side. The freezing water drained off their coats and the tousled horsehair of their underbellies immediately formed as icicles. After a few minutes they jangled in the wind. With four horses like this it was not far off a syncopated rhythm, a strange eerie winter music – ice on ice – packhorse music, walking into the head of the valley. Equine gamelan, an ice quartet.

For half an hour the icicles made their strange, slow, melancholic music, an icy xylophone that chipped and chimed. It suited the cold isolation. Then the wind got up. In the distance I could see more dust storms and whirling dervishes sweeping along the valley, picking up dry dust, sand tamarisk scrub from dried-up river beds and marshes. Whirling dervishes reached upwards for hundreds of feet, then just as suddenly disappeared or danced off in a different direction.

As we turned a corner it was our turn to face into the wind. Sand tattooed my face. I drew the headscarf tight around my eyes, put my shoulder into the wind and looked down just enough to see the path. Horses’ heads were also bowed as they knuckled under and sagged when the full force of the wind hit them. This was where they needed their thick coats and eyelashes to keep dust and grit out. We left them to their own devices following what path they could between the glacial deposits, rounded tumps known as drumlins. We drew our scarves even tighter but still the wind burrowed in. There was no respite.

The wind must have been at least 30 or 40 mph, a katabatic wind that dropped suddenly from the peaks.24 Stopping was out of the question, so we plodded on, hunched up, bent double.

This was the beginning of the Pense La, where we rejoined the road. Long stretches had been cleared and boulders moved, but bridges still had to be built. There were many bends ahead and the altitude began to tell. The horses took it at their own pace, as did we.

Every so often we could see evidence of road engineers – yellow paint daubed on rocks telling us how far we were from Kargil. Here were culverts in the making, footings for bridges, piles of stones waiting to be used as hardcore, oil stains where compressors and drills had worked. It all seemed somehow alien. By Himalayan standards this pass was tame – the section leading up to its highest point had taken five years to construct because there were so many bends, but the far side was far steeper. Mountains do not give way easily.

The more height we gained, the slower our progress and the more time there was to look at the peaks and glaciers. When the clouds cleared the whole run of mountains was visible in a chain, massif after massif. But I was still very wary of the weather. I knew from Andrew Wilson’s report of 1875 that six feet of snow fell overnight on the Pense La in September and that packhorses were left struggling up to their girth straps in snow. It was now mid-November and reaching Zangskar would be a close-run thing.

Pense La and Opus 133

You get used to sleeping on hard ground. No mat, no tent, no shelter, nothing. How I missed the foam-rubber mats that I had inadvertently left in a taxi down in Amritsar in the dark. So it was just a sleeping bag under the stars, but there weren’t any stars. Only just before dawn could you spot them, like navigation beacons. The smell of yak dung burning was welcome, as was the salt tea.25

Was it the third or the fourth night since Panikar? In these mountains time loses all meaning. The gradient of the road was not too steep as it wound backwards and forwards. Sometimes we took short cuts, always climbing up.

We slept out on the track halfway up the pass. By chance I had with me a new Sony radio/cassette recorder that was destined for the tehsildar of Padum26 – and I twiddled the knobs and was able to tune in to what turned out to be a rather clear signal. Radio Moscow – a late Beethoven string quartet eerily dancing its way through the mountain air. Opus 133, I think it was. Grosse Fuge. Great Fugue. Quiet then vibrant, almost demonic, like the whirling dervishes, the radio signal weaving in and out of the peaks. Trust the Russians. But then again radio reception would be pretty good. Central Asia was a stone’s throw away and we were very high up. Opus 133 kept the wolves at bay that night. Later on during the winter, wolves followed me much more closely.

The competing tunes and fugues were exhilarating, wild and uncompromising. It was exhausting to listen to. Even at sea level. And yet up here in the Himalaya it felt very appropriate. It had its own magic. It mirrored the strength of the mountains. The string quartet cut insistently through the cold air, on edge, manically tugging my mind this way and that. An urgency that matched my own – and the weather’s, which was hovering, as if the whole winter were condensed into those fifteen or sixteen hectic minutes. The Great Fugue, gyrating and pulling, plucking notes from the mountain air. A high-altitude concert. A brief respite – a final farewell – an invocation and offering to the spirits of the mountains as powerful as any that Buddhist monks could muster to keep the snow at bay. And then it was gone … Sadly I would have to sell the radio when I got into the valley to help pay the balance that I owed the horsemen.

We slept on the road because there was nowhere else to sleep, and just when we thought we were alone we met two men from Tungri, whose horses were carrying timber for building. Timber is very scarce in Zangskar and this looked like sawn timber from Kashmir, four by two, bought in Kargil. The timber was 15ft long and dragged on the ground, an ungainly load for horses, particularly when swinging around bends.

It was comforting to meet other travellers going in the same direction. We had a small fire and they joined us. So five of us camped out on the Pense La. The Zangskaris started singing low, slightly mournful songs, no doubt about their village … they sang well into the night. We slept by the embers of the fire. The stars shone very brightly between the clouds, a good sign because it meant that it would not snow.

The hour before dawn was always the coldest. The horsemen got up and went, bridles in hand, searching for the horses and put nosebags on them. They had not strayed far. No sooner had the horses chomped their way through the barley than the men sorted the loads. Four separate piles of luggage, odd-shaped hessian sacks that we knew by heart. With all three of us helping it only took about five minutes per horse to get them laden, the horses sensing the urgency as much as we did.

Loading in the half-light has its problems, and fingers were again very stubborn and clumsy. We soon left the men from Tungri behind. Their load kept slipping, and anyway they hadn’t got to make a return journey. Once over the pass they were home and dry.

The further we got up the pass, the lower the cloud came down. The small lake was completely frozen and a lopsided sign read ‘Pense La 14,500ft’. There was a chorten. The lhato was another pile of rocks, mani stones and quartz crystals with prayer flags and curved ibex horns.27 Ibex, sure-footed wild goat of the mountains and inner spirit of every Zangskari. Here resided the spirit of the pass, and Buddhists would light incense as offerings, sometimes branches of juniper they had brought with them, recite mantras that would give thanks to the gods and pray for a safe journey. Every house in Zangskar has its own small lhato. Offerings of incense are made every morning.

The marmots had gone underground. I marvelled at the marmot’s ability to hibernate for six or seven months.28 They could stay in their burrows from October to May, more than half the year. Their alarm call is a whistle, almost a sharp shriek like a bird of prey that at first has you looking up in the skies. Then you look down and see three or four chubby marmots standing up on their hind legs looking intently at you. Then diving down into their burrows as you get closer. But the pass was silent. Marmots all asleep, fathoms down.

It was so cold on the Pense La that not even a lammergeier circled. Only prayer flags fluttered, torn ragged in the stiff breeze. I placed a stone on the cairn and offered up a Buddhist prayer for the safe return of myself, the two horsemen and their horses.

It was on the other side of the pass that I got my first view of Zangskar in winter on the scarp, a steep 1,000ft drop. The road zig-zagged as it descended. To the south, amid long lines of ragged peaks, was the Durung Drung glacier, over a mile wide and snaking off eight or ten miles into the distance – a magnificent sight. An elegant glacier, its meltwater powered the upper reaches of Zangskar. Despite the cold winds I was happy. I knew deep down that the gamble to get into the valley before the snows came down had paid off. But I also knew that I would have to cross this pass again on my own on skis in deep snow in late spring when conditions would be very different and much more forbidding. My life in Zangskar was only just beginning. Winter was well on its way.

Home straight

That evening I watched the horsemen make the fire with dried dung. They blew carefully, mouths close to the earth, till the flame came and with it fragrant smoke that filled the valley like incense. We gathered firewood to see us through, for in Zangskar there is little. Here they do not so much as waste a twig. Life is very precious when in the balance.

In summer these open spaces were mountain pastures where herds of yak roamed. Villagers lived in low, black yak-hair tents like nomads, moving every few weeks to even higher pastures just below the snowline, then back down again – the ceaseless round of milking, making yogurt, butter churning, cheese making, dung collection, spinning and a little weaving, unchanged for thousands of years. And in autumn, after harvest, the animals returned to their villages carrying their own butter. Butter was currency and life itself, possessing high value and conferring status. Rents were paid in butter. Butter lamps burnt in monasteries, even though it left the paintings covered in a fine film of soot. Butter was used in every ceremony and had a high symbolic value. Offering butter was a gift from the gods. Butter was drunk in Tibetan salt tea and used for softening skins. It also warded off evil and disease. It was this butter that was traded down the chadar, the frozen river, in the depths of winter.

It was on the morning of the fifth day that I saw the first Zangskari village, Hagshu, on the other side of the river, a bleak spot in winter. Not even a dog barked. Up the side valley lay the Hagshu glacier and the Hagshu La, one of the highest routes over the Himalayan range, gaining you access to an array of fine peaks, all as yet unclimbed. It is from Hagshu La that the bears come over from Kishtwar. Himalayan brown bears. They are quite a nuisance and will even break into houses to find butter.

It was not till Abring that I saw houses on this side of the river. Three hamlets scattered amid the alluvial fan of a stream, where it was just possible to clear enough rocks to give the fields a chance. Borderline agriculture.

The fields looked bare. At 13,000ft they can only just grow barley and peas, while lower down they grow wheat at 12,000ft, some of the highest wheat in the world. These are remarkable agricultural settlements. Barley grows at 14,000ft. Crop genetics must play a part. Seed grain is exchanged between villages every few years. The lower villages have more fields and less livestock, the higher villages more livestock. Then there are nomads from the east who exchange salt and wool for grain. A complex and delicate trading system that has evolved over hundreds, possibly thousands of years. And there are still traces of the old hunting community as well, in the villagers’ social life, carvings and diet.

It is remarkable that anything grows at all in such a short season from May to September, but it does. At these altitudes there is increased ultraviolet light, which may help. As we pass, people raise the odd hand but our passage is not remarked upon. They see horsemen all the year round.

It was near Phe that we spent the last night. We had made good progress. On the map I noticed all the glaciers that we had passed but were often unseen deep within the main Himalayan range. Most were named on the map: Haskira, Kange, then Hagshu, Sumche, Lechan and Mulung, the valley that led up to Dzongkhul monastery and the famous Umasi La. Then the Haftal glacier. All unseen yet crucial.

Dzongkhul monastery produced many fine scholars, including Nawang Tsering.29 It is believed to have been the site of a cave used by the Indian mystic Naropa for meditation. Meditation is such a key part of Tibetan Buddhism that monks are often very reluctant to talk about it. To many monks, meditation is such a commonplace activity that they see no need to mention it; plus, they are often given special teachings and cannot divulge these teachings to the uninitiated. Talking about silence is immediately a contradiction.

For a thousand years or more Zangskar has been an ideal spot for such meditators and they will often find their own remote places in which to practise. That is until the arrival of the road. I was afraid that the valley would soon be filled with the noise of diesel engines. But trade was trade.

These monks will secrete themselves away in remote caves. Some will be walled up for three years, three months, three weeks and three days. Such advanced meditators are fed by local villagers and left to their own devices. Some are Tibetans who have been forced to flee their own country.

I regarded these meditating monks like glaciers, hidden away above the villages, often unseen, but their influence was vital. Great reservoirs of knowledge, powerful and solid. Without them, Zangskar would be infinitely poorer. Hopefully they would not melt away. Here time and space are held in mind. Each frozen waterfall is now silent, each cave a retreat, with its own echo and texture.

Explosives and chang

Day six. After Phe came the village of Rantaksha, where I met a group of men working on the road led by a young, energetic monk from Karsha monastery. He wore his yellow hat askew and was the local explosives expert. The introduction of explosives into the valley posed its own problems, which I discovered had quite a bit to do with certain people fishing … getting the length of fuse right was crucial and knowing where to run to always helped.

They signalled to us to get down and we all ducked just in time behind a mani wall as a loud explosion sent fragments of rock sailing over our heads. The monk ran out to see the effects of his handiwork. They had no drill and no compressor, so there was no depth to the explosion. An obstinate boulder that took several days to remove.

Here the road was being constructed by the villagers themselves. The headman was the foreman, and his responsibility was to make up that section of road. Both men and women were employed with picks and shovels, the men paid 15 rupees a day and the women 12 rupees. The men were often old and worked more slowly, but the women often had young babies and stopped to breastfeed them. They joked and laughed. It was a family affair. Sometimes in the summer you could hear the air filled with wonderful lilting songs as a gang of young women shovelled away. They knew how to enjoy life and worked faster than the men.

Truth of the matter was that it was often difficult to get the men to work on the roads because they regarded working in the fields at harvest time as more important, or else they were off trading or on the high pastures. So it was often only the old men who were at home and able to work. Why did they need a road? Were horses and yaks not good enough? Also, they had no real notion of what money was or understood its true value. Everything was exchanged in what was essentially a barter economy. Fair exchange is no robbery. Stocks and shares. Yaks and butter.

Bridges were major jobs, and government engineers were employed on their construction in summer. The road had to be finished up to that point to enable lorries to bring steel girders and joists. Traditional Zangskari bridges were constructed from birch twigs plaited together to make cables that were then strung across the roaring torrents to make suspension bridges, some as long as 200ft. There was one at Padum, another longer one at Zangla, and many others. Ancient technology, but it worked well and was sustainable.

The roadmen, pleased with their morning’s work, sat down in a circle on old rugs and produced chang, the local homemade barley beer made without hops or malt, which they then proceeded to drink. This beer, always a bit murky, appeared from a large brass cauldron they had concealed behind a large rock. There was a brass ladle, and they filled up small wooden cups that they had secreted in their cloaks.

With all the earth moving and demolition of rocks, the natural order of things had been upset and the earth spirits had to be appeased. Even when ploughing took place the earth spirits had to be placated, but with the road building some older people felt that unseen forces were being disturbed that would later engulf the valley. Yet here no one seemed to mind very much. They had a job of work to do. The lords of the soil might very well be offended, but they bided their time.

The men chatted away and then offered me some more chang. I declined politely, saying I had to get to Padum. The horsemen had been careful not to engage anyone in conversation and were now almost out of sight. The road was one of the more exciting things to happen to Zangskar, another invasion of sorts. As one wise old man later said to me, ‘Yes, the road will come. We cannot stop it. But when it comes we will lose our peace of mind.’ The roadmen slipped into quiet, almost contemplative silence, and then ten minutes later went back to work refreshed. On the other side of the river lay the village of Ating, which was en route for Dzongkhul monastery.

Tungri, which means ‘conch shell mountain’, was where the two men carrying the long lengths of timber were from. The road crossed the river on a narrow bridge that was just large enough for horses. The river was completely frozen over. From this point we entered the great triangular plain of Padum, which extended for about ten miles. It was here that the two powerful rivers joined to make up the Zangskar river.

From Tungri to the next village of Sani was about two miles. I could already see the trees in the distance. Sani is a holy village with many old carvings and an ancient monastery. As I passed by I saw the holy lake – frozen over. It is the holiest village in Zangskar, dating back to the time of the great Kushana king Kanishka, and the spiritual nerve centre of Zangskar.

In the summer there are festivals and half of Zangskar gathers to read the Buddhist scriptures. As well as housing Naropa’s shrine, Sani is also the site for the guardian deity of the valley, called Junu Tunglak.30 They used to make animal sacrifices in his honour well within living memory. The shaman would go into a trance and give prophecies, even stick swords into himself. The name of Junu Tunglak is feared and respected, and the old rock carvings are smeared with butter as offerings.

After Sani we crossed the plain of Padum and passed long mani walls, old carvings and the odd lhato. It was getting towards afternoon and another dust storm blew up. In the distance it was just possible to make out the village of Padum clustered round the terminal moraine, the houses closely packed between the rocks.

When we approached I saw a strange sight. Horsemen by the score suddenly emerged from the village, maybe fifty or sixty of them galloping off in all directions, all in red cloaks. It seemed as if all the headmen of all the villages and all the head monks had gathered there for a conference or special meeting and were now returning home. It was a fantastic sight in the dust and the dusk. These men knew how to gallop. As we got nearer, many of them passed us, proud, almost warlike. It was like a raid, and some even carried rifles. They had probably served in the Ladakh Scouts. Buddhist, yes, but Zangskari first.

Arrival

At long last I had arrived, my journey from Panikar to Padum having taken six days, one day less than planned. The packhorses were unloaded, my luggage taken upstairs and dumped on the floor of the small room. The horses had been excellent. I could not have done without them. I went to the tehsildar and in his small cramped office, which was also his living room, I exchanged the radio/cassette recorder for 1,000 rupees. I then paid the horsemen their balance and gave them some extra clothing to stave off the cold on the way back.

From the small temple on top of the mound I heard the long, low, unmistakeable sound of monastic horns, like the lowing of cattle. It went on for most of the night, as it was the tenth day of the tenth month of the Fire Dragon year. The ceremony commemorated the arrival in Tibet of Guru Rinpoche, alias Padmasambhava, after whom Padum was said to be named. Form and emptiness, skilful means, Middle Path and all that, the wisdom of the sword cutting through delusion. I felt that Buddhist Zangskar was at last beginning to flex its muscles.

I would miss the lilt of the packhorses, their pace and temperament, their silent loyalty and the steady click, click, click of their hooves, the smell of eau de cheval. One journey was over and another much longer journey was beginning. Surviving the winter was not just a physical challenge but like a koan, an unanswerable question, a riddle, a silent Buddhist paradox that had to be solved.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.