Chapter 3 In the Steps of the Yak

August 29

The seat was hard; coconut husk stuffing burst from the vinyl upholstery. The bus’s suspension had long ago collapsed, but there was a soothing, maritime sway to the way the vehicle rolled down the road. It was five a.m. and in the moonglow, thin alpine grass outside shivered in the silver light. I felt the stub of the ticket I had bought to get on the bus. I was tired, still half-asleep and a fragile memory came to me in a rush.

A few summers before, Gareth had impulsively bought me a ticket to join him at a rock concert. I had just returned from a long summer of working in a remote bush camp and was about to leave for Europe and the ski-racing season. There was no time to go to a concert with my younger brother. I was too cool, too full of my own importance – too much ego hung on my body. The recollection came in a flash of images and in the darkness of that frigid bus it felt like such a wasted opportunity. My body trembled and the emotion overcame me, and I cried for what could have been. I cried silently, holding it to myself.

Kargil District, Jammu AND Kashmir, India

In the seat beside me an ancient Ladakhi lady stared straight ahead. She had skin like old leather and burgundy robes that smelled of butter and dried grass. I was embarrassed by the tears and tried harder to hold them back, but it was impossible and my body shook more. Silently the old lady moved her hand on top of mine. Her palm was like paper. She didn’t try to hold on; she just left it there and the dry warmth was all I needed to know I wasn’t alone in the universe.

The bus was headed from Leh, the capital of Ladakh district in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, 234 kilometres west to Kargil, the small capital of its namesake district in the same state. As the crow flies Kargil is only sixty kilometres from Khapalu, the village in Pakistan where I had left off my trek, but Kargil sits on the Indian side of the disputed Line of Control while Khapalu is on the Pakistani. Four times in the past fifty years fighting has broken out between India and Pakistan over where the “true” border lies. Consequently, the land between Kargil and Khapalu is a “hot zone,” a territory of confused sovereignty criss-crossed with minefields, firing lines, bunkers and trenches.

It’s impossible to cross this no man’s land, so to make the sixty-kilometre trip from Khapalu to Kargil I had to travel by jeep from Khapalu to Gilgit, by bus to Rawalpindi and on to Lahore, then across the border by train to New Delhi to board a plane to Leh on the northern side of the Himalayas. There finally I caught another local bus to Kargil. That’s how a sixty-kilometre walk became a convoluted journey of more than 3,000 kilometres. The trip took me a week.

My plan had been to take the overnight bus from Leh to Kargil, then walk southwest from Kargil along the Wakha River and cross a mountain pass to the Sangeluma River. From there I wanted to cross another pass to reach the monastery of Lamayuru and head south following rivers and crossing passes until I reached the Zanskar Valley.

I’d counted on that section of the walk taking me about two weeks, so when I reached Leh I was taken aback by news of political problems in Zanskar. To pressure the state government of Jammu and Kashmir to grant more autonomy to the remote valley – a Buddhist enclave in a majority Muslim district – the Zanskaris were denying access to foreigners. After four days of frustrating delays in Leh, I decided it was better to risk the circumstances than to jeopardize my walk. So, under bright moonlight, I boarded a local bus and rumbled off into the night.

August 30

Kargil sits at the confluence of the Suru and the smaller Wakha rivers. It is a town of 10,000 people and is similar to many of its sister villages across the border in Pakistan with mud-brick, flat-roofed houses, concrete-block government buildings, a noisy bus park and a coating of dust on everything. But Kargil seemed a particularly dirty place. Maybe there was more traffic, and so more diesel exhaust stains on the walls and pools of oil by the side of the road, but there was also bright plastic garbage blowing in the wind and the laundry I saw flapping in the breeze was speckled with soot. Kargil is the last Muslim town before the shift to Buddhism and the town closest to the disputed border. It is a place on the frontier of religious and political divisions. Some residents resent the fact they are controlled by the Indian Army. As one man with a full beard, grimy jeans and the smell of old tobacco about him whispered to me in a tea shop by the bus park, “We are occupied by a force of idol worshippers and dark men.”

The place was not inviting, so after that quick cup of tea, during which I felt that half the men in the crowded chai shop were staring at me, I walked southeast down the Wakha Valley. I passed a few small villages along the way and after about twenty kilometres reached the confluence of the Wakha and Phokar rivers where I turned south and soon came to Phokar village, the first Buddhist community on my trek. Families were in the fields harvesting barley and because of the altitude, 3,200 metres, for the first time I saw yaks instead of goats grazing on the leftover stubble. I later learned the animals at Phokar were in fact a cross between yaks and cows called a dzo, bred for their higher milk production and more manageable demeanour.

The pungent smell of dung fires lingered in the air. The village looked prosperous. Every few hundred metres I passed two-storey mud-brick mansions with walls a metre and a half thick and flat roofs piled high with tight sheaves of freshly cut barley. The whitewashed walls were rubbed with diamond-shaped, blood-red markings, which I was to learn were protection from the evil spirits that many Buddhist Ladakhis believe lurk behind every ill-considered action. On the roofs of the houses, above the front doors, conical, one-metre-high terra cotta incense burners billowed out peppery, juniper wood smoke; locals believe the particular smell attracts benevolent energies.

The majority of Ladakhis follow a Tibetan style of Buddhism which traces its local history back to the eighth century when the region was caught in the midst of the clash between Chinese and Tibetan expansionism. Control of the region moved back and forth between the two powers but in 842 Nyima-Gon, a Tibetan royal representative, took advantage of the chaos surrounding the separation of the Tibetan empire and annexed Ladakh for himself. This initiated a period of Tibetanization that has continued to this day. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Ladakh was invaded multiple times by Muslim armies. It was splintered but never completely conceded its independence and in 1470 King Lhachen Bhagan united the state and founded the Namgyal dynasty that still exists. In 1834 the Dogra army from Jammu successfully invaded Ladakh and made it part of Kashmir. During partition in 1947 Ladakh was invaded by the Pakistani Army. Kargil and Zanskar were occupied but eventually, after the Namgyal king signed the Instrument of Accession, which made the area an official part of the new Indian state, the Indian Army repulsed the invaders.

The trail up through the village was lined with stupas, earthen domes built upon square mud-brick pedestals and topped with brick or brass spires. Some were crumbling, while others seemed freshly painted. The stupas came in all sizes, some smaller than an upended shoebox, others more than seven metres high. Stupas were the earliest Buddhist religious monuments. Initially they were built to house what were thought to be relics of the Buddha. Over time they changed from being reliquaries to being objects of veneration themselves. Stupas came to be propitiated not for what they may have contained, but for what they represented. They have become architectural manifestations of the Buddha.

I tried to imagine the stupa as a devoted Buddhist might: the square base stepping upwards like a mind logically moving through levels of realization towards a state of enlightenment; the spherical core, both expansive and receptive, like the knowledge of the Buddha; and atop the dome a spire, a needle of fierce mind reaching for the highest state of consciousness.

By the roadside and scattered around the stupas were boulders, rocks and pebbles each chiselled with the ubiquitous Tibetan mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum: Om – the jewel inside the lotus flower – Hum. I found myself repeating it in time with my steps. Om – stride, Mani – stride, Padme – stride, Hum – stride. I had learned the mantra years before in Kathmandu and it had become a peaceful mumble that, to this day, sneaks up on me unconsciously.

I played with the words, quickened my pace and the mantra sped up. I slowed and the prayer lingered, working its way like a bass tone into my chest, sound and movement working together.

I bent down and picked up one of the mani stones. It was flattened and water-worn, a perfect river skimmer, smooth on one side, rippled with chisel work on the other. I slipped it into my trousers and felt it rubbing through the thin cotton of my pocket against my thigh.

I pitched my tent that night a few kilometres beyond Phokar in the lee of a wall constructed of thousands upon thousands of hand-carved mani stones, a work of devotion generations in the making. As I lay in my sleeping bag, a breeze blew through the stones, generating an undulating moan. The prayers serenaded me to sleep.

August 31

I slept in late, knowing I had only a five-kilometre walk up a side stream of the Phokar River to reach Urgyen Dzong, a cave where legend has it the eighth-century Buddhist saint Padmasambhava, also known as Guru Rinpoche, “the Lotus Born One,” spent time in meditative retreat.

Padmasambhava’s life is a rich mixture of myth, legend and archeological fact. Born in the Swat Valley in what is now Northwestern Pakistan, he became a great scholar of the esoteric school of tantric Buddhism and was renowned for his ability to memorize religious texts and put the teachings immediately into action. His fame reached the Tibetan king, Trisong Detsen (742–797), who invited Padmasambhava to Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, to overpower what he believed was a demonic force that was draining the life from his country. Legend has it that Guru Rinpoche overthrew the demons not by eliminating them, but by using tantric practices and redirecting their negative energy for the cause of the good, in this case the diffusion of Buddhism. Padmasambhava is regarded by many Tibetan Buddhists as the second most powerful figure in the religion after the Buddha himself.

For Guru Rinpoche to travel from the Swat Valley to Lhasa he most likely would have passed through the area of the Wakha and Phokar rivers.

To reach the cave hermitage I followed a pebbly stream eastward from the Phokar River to a fifteen-metre chain of ladders that climbed three interconnected waterfalls. At the base of the falls I met a monk headed in the opposite direction. He was a young man with a bouncy step who broke into a broad smile when he saw me. He shook his dripping burgundy robes and water flew everywhere. Grabbing my right forearm with one hand and my right hand with his other he asked me excitedly, “You go to cave?”

I nodded and he shouted, “Good, very good!” then slapped me on the back so hard I lost my breath. He didn’t seem to have time for a chat and before I could get a word in he was off towards the village, his waterlogged sneakers squelching with each step.

The canyon walls framing the cascades were carved with mantras and rose far above me on either side. The sound of the creek reverberated all around. The water’s spray worked through my shirt and pants, clammy against my skin. Strung across the lip of the chasm were lines of prayer flags – red, green, yellow, blue, and white – all snapping in the breeze, tinting the light that filtered into the depths.

The ladder to the topmost waterfall wobbled as I scrambled up it, so I tried to keep one hand on the algae-slick surface of the cliff wall. At the fall’s upper edge the fissure opened out onto a ring of sandstone cliffs surrounding a shaly hillock. On the mound stood a modest temple, and when I arrived I found its door was open. Another small room lay off to one side – the monk’s quarters, I assumed. Its door was bolted shut and secured with a large brass padlock.

Inside the temple were the customary triumvirate of Tibetan Buddhist images: the historical Buddha Shakyamuni; Avolaskiteshvara, the many-armed representation of compassion; and, on the Buddha’s right side, his eyes wide and all seeing, sat Padmasambhava – Guru Rinpoche.

From the hill I scanned across the cliffs looking for the cave. It took some time to find it. The hollow was so inconspicuous that were it not for the faded ochre paint spilling from its entrance I may never have spotted it.

Two caves, one on top of the other, make up the shrine. Both were much smaller than I expected, and neither was tall enough for my six-foot frame to stand up in. The lower grotto is thought to be Guru Rinpoche’s kitchen and the upper one his meditation chamber. A small stupa is built in the highest room. Around it were placed traditional offerings of butter lamps, flowers, silk scarves, pictures of the master or other great teachers and many prayer stones. Each of the items was an offering to the senses: vision, smell, touch.

In the kitchen area, in the shallow dip in the floor that is said to have been the saint’s hearth, pilgrims have left bracelets, necklaces, beads and brooches. Fruity aromatic oils had permeated the stone. Himalayan blue poppies and white columbines were arranged off to one side in a pink plastic tumbler. These were women’s offerings, intended to draw some of the saint’s energy into their own homes.

I pitched my tent near the small temple on the hill. I had thought about sleeping in Guru Rinpoche’s kitchen, but the place had been cold and damp and I was nervous I might breach some local custom. It was a strange night, as a wind howled continuously and the circle of cliffs around me amplified the sound. Eventually, I dropped to sleep while a banshee wailed and whipped at the loose ends flapping around my tent. Even with the noise and commotion, I was still glad I hadn’t stayed in the cave.

September 1

I retraced my steps back down to Phokar village and the Wakha River, then followed it east another twenty kilometres to Mulbekh, the next large village. I arrived in late afternoon. Most of the day’s walk had been on trails close to the main road so I was dusty and tired. I easily found a room in the guest house overlooking its major attraction, a ten-metre-tall sculpture of the future Buddha, Maitreya, carved into a twenty-metre-high finger of stone. Maitreya, like the belief in Christianity of the second coming of Jesus, is the Buddha who will appear when he is needed most. He is the successor to the historical Buddha Shakyamuni (Sage of the Shakyas) who, until he discovered the Buddhist path to higher consciousness, lived as Prince Siddhartha Gautama in Northern India in the fifth century B.C.E.

Strangely, the main road between Leh and Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, runs directly in front of the statue. It was impossible to sit on the deck of the guest house, sip a cup of tea and take in the statue without being blasted by one of the dozens of trucks that rumbled by that evening.

September 2

The next morning, as the sun rose and softened the thin air’s bite, I crossed the road vowing to see the Buddha sculpture before the truck convoys began. The monks who take care of the statue had already opened the door to the compound and from the dusty quadrangle I watched the Buddha stir with the first sign of the sun’s ascent. An unhurried golden wave swept over it. The movement was barely perceptible, like tides with the pull of the moon. The sun was performing the statue’s morning ablutions, catching the sculpture at shallow angles and highlighting chisel work still deep and defined after 1,400 years.

An inscription to one side of the statue suggested that the Buddha was carved between the seventh and eighth centuries, a time before Buddhism was fully established in Tibet. If that were the case, the inspiration and maybe even the labour would have come from Kashmir, which was a hotbed of Buddhist learning at that time. The sculpture has a distinct Hindu feel to it; the Buddha has long flowing hair and his four hands each hold religious implements, traits associated with the Hindu god Shiva rather than with the more austere Buddha. The statue is a reminder that before he discovered his own path to enlightenment, Buddha was a Hindu.

Maitreya is considered by Buddhists to be a bodhisattva, a key concept in Tibetan Buddhism. Bodhisattvas are individuals who have the ability to reach the stage of full enlightment but delay their progress in order to assist other beings in their quest for the highest state of development. Many Buddhists believe the Dalai Lama is such a bodhisattva – delaying his own enlightenment in order to guide others along the path.

When I became interested in Buddhism I thought of Gareth as my personal bodhisattva, the one who had pushed me out of my old life in search of something more fulfilling. It was an absurdly simplistic interpretation of a difficult concept, but there was a grain of truth to it because through the loss I was forced to study my life intently: what I did and didn’t do, what made me happy, what I had regretted. Those considerations pushed me farther towards Buddhism’s teachings of self-responsibility, respect for all beings and a life ordered around the twin pillars of wisdom and compassion.

Later that morning I followed the Wakha River east, turned south out of the main valley at the village of Kharl and climbed the Sirwastun-la (la in Tibetan languages means pass) towards Budh Kharbu village. The climb was up a wide, shaly, windblown slope. There were no trees, only tumbleweeds and stub-leafed aromatics – thyme, sage, marjoram – whose fragrance floated in the air, spicing the wind with high-desert incense.

Near the summit I was surprised to see a group of grazing horses, two pale mares and a yearling, just below the ridgeline. I had seen sheep, goats and yaks in my first few days in Ladakh but no horses. Their focus was absorbed in a square metre of plant life directly in front of them. They moved efficiently, slowly, with purpose. The wind caught their manes, throwing them wildly from side to side, then a shift in the wind brought them my scent. They lifted their heads, saw me, and as suddenly as they had appeared they burst from their formation and galloped in a wide vee over the crest of the hill.

Over that next rise, in the wind shadow of the bare ridge, I came upon two men wearing army surplus pants and jackets. They were sitting and chatting outside a tent made from a frayed khaki nylon parachute. Smiling, they waved me over. I joined them by their dung fire, its glowing embers pulsing with the breeze. Over the fire an aluminum pot of arak, the local rice alcohol, was warming. I was handed a battered enamel mug topped with the strong brew, and no words were spoken until we finished our cups. Afterwards they explained in Hindi how they were on a week-long fodder cutting expedition and the horses were theirs. The cups were filled again and the younger man asked in slow English where I was headed. I indicated to the east and using a stick he drew me a map of the route in the sandy soil at our feet.

We talked haltingly in both languages about home and being away from it. The men enjoyed their time in the mountains every summer with only their animals and what they could carry. Summer was about being outside, while winter was about being at home, about telling stories around the kitchen fire and, as the younger man said with half a smile, “making babies.”

They insisted I stay for another cup. I did, and joined them for one more after that, but after the fourth I excused myself, having felt the effects of the arak moving hotly down my spine. I rose on unsteady legs and moved out of the hollow back into the dry wind. The men were waving and laughing at my instability. I waved back. The horses were there again, only now instead of running away they stood firm and stared at me until I was out of sight.

I camped that night on the far side of the Sirwastun-la. The sky was cloudless so there was no need to pitch the tent. I laid my sleeping bag on a hard-packed strip of goat-sheared grass overlooking a file of sandstone cliffs. From my nylon cocoon I watched the sun play on the spires, vast, drafty palaces of ochre and purple. Alpine swifts flitted in and out of the recesses that marked the walls, catching the sun in wing-flicked bursts. Night’s blackness crept down the rock face, devouring the cliff’s colours. Silence and darkness arrived together.

September 3

With sunup I packed my bag and dropped from the pass following the Kharbu River into an arid but well-irrigated valley. Channels of all sizes split and moved the small stream to every accessible patch of fertile ground. The barley fields were almost cropped. Potato flowers bloomed, their purple corollas offset by golden stamens. The dusty path was intersected by stupas and paralleled by walls of prayer stones. The air was touched with dung-fire smoke and sizzling oil, hints of the midday meal. I passed three quiet clusters of mud-brick houses before the trail returned to the road. The smell of simple lunches gave way to the caustic reek of diesel. I was back following the road up the Sangeluma River towards the Foto-la.

The trail to the pass pushed directly up the slope, intersecting the switchbacked road at even intervals. During the afternoon rain started to fall and the grey sky dropped to the earth. I pushed through a mist so dense it felt as though I were in two worlds. By the road, blaring juggernaut trucks came at me, laser-beam headlights cutting the fog, the drivers struggling to control top-heavy loads on the slick ribbon of asphalt. Then the trail would cut away and a blanket of cloud enveloped me. Ahead the green pasture melted into a pale horizon and traffic noise reached me as underwater thunder.

Down the eastern side of the Foto-la I almost ran. The trail was a steady grade and the rain encouraged me to hurry. I entered the monastery village of Lamayuru on the traditional route from the northwest, a path lined with hundreds of metres of chest-high, prayer-stone walls. The legacy of an entire community’s devotion, hundreds of thousands of stones were chiselled with Sanskrit and Tibetan mantras, images of the Buddha, wheels of life and simple circular mandalas. More than once I stopped to touch them. The stones were cold and shimmering in the rain. The walls were crumbling, the connecting mortar peeling away. Golden saxifrage flowers bloomed through the relics. The structure was deteriorating but the stones survived.

From that angle the Lamayuru monastery, or gompa in Tibetan, is one of the most impressive in the Himalayas. It sits tottering on an aggregate stone bluff fifty metres above the village. The complex is a huge construction, a hundred metres by a hundred metres, a disintegrating mud-brick fortress. I had seen it before in bright sunshine, when the buildings had been radiant, their walls blistered white, like houses on a Greek island. But the rain had changed its demeanour, and now the gompa looked ominous. Grey and overbearing, it had the air of a sedentary but unapproachable animal. In desert country moisture undermines your understanding of the landscape.

Lamayuru is the oldest and largest monastery in Ladakh. Legend has it that Naropa, one of the great Indian Buddhist scholars, came to Lamayuru in the eleventh century and spent many years meditating in a local cave. At that time the area around the monastery was a lake, but Naropa’s meditation practice was so powerful it caused a split in the surrounding hillside, a geological feature that can still be seen today, and the lake emptied through this opening. After the lake drained, Naropa found a dead lion and on this spot the master built the first temple of the Lamayuru complex, the Singhe Ghang (Lion Mound). From that single temple the monastery grew to be the largest in Ladakh. At one time it consisted of five large prayer halls and more than four hundred monks, but now only a single main hall remains and 150 monks reside there.

In Tibetan Buddhism the monastery typically takes the high ground, the site of authority. It looks over its congregation, emphasizing how the building stores the community’s knowledge and in a practical sense provides a raised defensive position in time of war. But Lamayuru was now a microscosm of India’s changing mores because the highest construction in Lamayuru is no longer the monastery but the road. The highway winds around the mountain high above the village and the gompa. The cloister has been supplanted; the road is the new connection between the people’s earthly reality and the heavenly abodes of Delhi and Mumbai.

I stayed in a guest house in the village and after a cup of hot tea I changed into some dry clothes and made my way up the hill to the gompa. A few children were playing in the courtyard. When they saw me they ran off and came back with Karma, a young shaven-headed monk, who spoke much better English than my Hindi. He shook my hand almost violently and while still holding it pulled me towards the prayer hall.

This was the room I was most interested in as it is built around the cave that Naropa had legendarily meditated in ten centuries ago. I had expected the grotto to be in the centre of the room, the focus of the monastery’s activity. After all, Naropa is part of a great lineage of Buddhist teachers. His teacher was the master Tilopa, the founder of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism which the monastery belongs to. Tilopa developed the Buddhist Mahamudra philosophy, a way of knowledge Buddhists consider to be the true nature of the mind.

The prayer hall was the size of a small gymnasium. There were no windows and it took a while for my eyes to adjust. It had the smell of old things, brass and worn wood, burnt oil and ancient bodies. The young monk provided commentary as we circled the room. At the front of the hall was the chesthigh wooden throne of the head lama. It was draped in gold and burgundy silk, and large pictures of the Karmapa, the leader of the Kargyu school, were placed above those of the head lama. Karma’s explanation over the competition for the seat was, “Lama is great, but Karmapa is greater.”

To the right of the throne was a small stupa and statues of Padmasambhava and a former head lama of the monastery. As Karma explained in his succinct way, “Great lama, dead long ago.” On the other side were statues of Mahakala, the most fearsome of the Buddhist guardian deities, and a female guardian deity who Karma did not name, but described as “very strong lady.” Considering she had what looked like a garland of human skulls around her neck and held a severed skull cap dripping with blood, I had to agree.

Behind the throne and statues were a series of thangkas, Tibetan paintings on canvas, depicting the many incarnations of the Buddha. On the right was a statue of Tara, a female deity considered to be the embodiment of compassion. Karma’s comment: “Very beautiful lady.”

I was interested in the statues but could see no sign of the legendary cave. I asked Karma about it, and his eyes brightened. “Oh yes,” he said, “you know our Naropa?” and pulled me over to a small glass door in a red and gold frame. Behind it was what I would have to describe as a slit in the rock face against which the prayer hall was built. It was small and very narrow, and I don’t think even in my most yogic moments I could have fit inside it, but that didn’t matter as the space was taken up by three statues, Naropa, and his legendary students Marpa and Milarepa. It would have been a miracle for the great teacher to have spent much time in there, but of course that is the point; somewhere as memorable as Lamayuru really should be founded on a miracle.

September 4

I stayed in Lamayuru another day to take a day walk up a tributary valley to the small monastery of A-Tisey. I started walking through drizzly rain and as I gained altitude the rain transformed to snow. By the time I reached the monastery I felt as if I was floating through a soft blizzard. On the trail I passed stolid yaks with their horns draped in bright silk ribbons, marks of their owner’s pride. They stood unwavering, waiting out the hard weather in four-legged meditation. I arrived through fields of snow-blanketed barley. The early snowfall had collapsed hectares of grain and unless the sun returned to evaporate the frozen weight the harvest was doomed. By the scattered houses below the monastery mastiff guard dogs barked and tugged their choke chains to breaking. Past them, in a swirl of mist, trapped at the end of a box canyon, above a trio of farmer’s huts, was the gompa.

I climbed the monastery steps but found the prayer hall locked; the local lamas, I later discovered, were helping the villagers clear snow from the ill-fated crop. I returned to the huts below, knocked on doors and eventually, from a one-room house set away from the others, an old man and his wife came to my aid. I explained in a combination of Hindi, English and sign language that I wanted to see the prayer hall and from beneath the purple sash girdling his waist the old fellow produced a cluster of keys so dense it looked like a metallic hedgehog.

We walked back up the trail. Well, I walked; the old man shuffled painfully, which maybe explained his absence from the fields. Fumbling to extract one of the medieval-looking keys, he opened the prayer room door. He turned and smiled; three blackened stubs were all he had for teeth. His face was broad and dark, his skin creased like an ancient cowboy’s. Each time I tried to speak he smashed his open palm against my back and let air whistle through his broken teeth.

We took our shoes off at the door, and the cold of the smooth mud floor crept through my woolen socks. The man was keen to show me the prayer hall and even more intent that he, the tiny boy who had followed us and snuck into the temple between our legs, and I should prostrate before the life-sized gilded Buddha that took pride of place on a throne at the head of the room. He was indicating with his hands how the three of us should drop our heads to the floor, but I was unsure. I was stalling.

Was I ready, ready to commit myself to such an act of faith? Having been raised Presbyterian I had never bowed before a statue before. To expose myself in front of an image was something distant for me. But in truth I felt comfortable there, the snow falling outside, the smell of wood and butter all around and beside me a little boy with a baby goat held close to his chest.

Images came to me. The countless prayer stones scattered across the valley. The thousands of stupas, whole plains given over to those reminders of what is important to Buddhists. I thought of the old man’s wife, standing in her doorway, waving as we left their house. Her dried-apple smile was as toothless and generous as her husband’s.

Through an open window I smelled the snow, the first of the season, fresh as clean paper.

The Buddha sat before us.

Balanced.

His hands, strong and pliable, hovered over bent knees; his eyes, half-open, were those of an adoring mother.

He was perfectly motionless.

The old man was chanting prayers and moving his hands in the tai-chi style gestures called mudras. He started to drop to the floor and I found myself following; three generations dropped our foreheads to the floor. It was a layering of ages. I heard the rustle of the man’s heavy woolen robes and the cracking of his ancient joints. To my left the boy’s wheezing tubercular breath meshed with my own. I felt the cold, dry mud of the prayer room floor, smooth from afar, but abrasive against my forehead.

Behind me three goats were backlit against the open doorway, their heads cocked, amber slit-eyes staring, unblinking.

The old man mumbled mantras – rough, warm, words.

We returned to standing and repeated the motion. One prostration for the Buddha, another for Avoleskitevara, a last for Guru Rinpoche.

Three completions and I returned to standing – still Jono Lineen, still with both feet on the chilly prayer room floor. I looked at the man and the little boy with a face as smooth as peanut butter, still absorbed in prostrating, not interested in an elated novice.

The old man invited me to his home. In the kitchen we sipped cups of bu-ja, Tibetan salt tea. The old lady had made it when we arrived, pouring boiling water from a kettle on the woodstove into a long wooden tube encased in hammered brass. Then she added chunks of black Chinese brick tea, flakes of salt and a few pats of golden butter. The mixture was churned vigourously in the tube, then the contents poured into the wooden cups laid on the low table before us.

The old lady looked every bit the good witch, her face creased by sun and labour, hair like tufted steel wool protruding from a bright yellow, many-peaked, woolen felt hat. The tea tasted like soup, excellent for the freezing weather. There was no conversation; we smiled at each other. I pointed at the cup, making thumbs-up gestures. Eventually, my sign language grew stale. The lady was ready to brew another batch of tea/soup but I stood, pointed to the door and bowed with insistence. The man escorted me out. His wife waved. Outside snow was still falling.

September 5

Early the next day I left Lamayuru to walk south over the Prinkiti-la for Wanla village at the junction of the Shillakong and Yapola rivers. The bad weather held, wreaking havoc on the trail. In shiny mud I slipped uncontrollably on the way up, but the route down was even worse. Cabin-size hoodoo slabs of silt-stone tumbled from the walls lining the track.

When I reached Wanla, sky and earth were the same dull shade of grey but nearby at the rivers’ confluence the mist had risen and shafts of light broke the cloud. The sun struck the dewy landscape, briefly returning harvest colour to the quilt-patterned fields. Beyond the village were more signs of the rain’s destruction. Puddles gathered where almost ripe barley should have been and tattered, blue plastic tarpaulins covered the circular, hard-packed threshing grounds by every home. The hamlet’s small gompa, a series of low one-storey buildings, sat high upon a razor-backed ridge north of the village. The mud-brick buildings were so close in colour to that of the land they looked to be sprouting organically from the hill. Only the cream and carmine washes around the windows and doors distinguished them from the earth.

I made lunch under a tree and some villagers, a bedraggled trio of men on their way to survey damaged crops, stopped to talk. They told me how the rain was destroying the trail to Zanskar. Only a single group had gotten through the gorge from Hanupatta village the day before and that passage was won only after hours of rebuilding the path and with the loss of one precious horse; in seconds the poor animal had slipped in the mud, gone over a cliff and been taken by the river. Until the rain ceased and there were three days of sun, the villagers said, they would not move their livestock from the secure high pastures. I asked if they thought a single man could make it through the gorge and an old fellow in a threadbare burgundy hat and rubber boots three sizes too big for him piped up in English, “You’re crazy enough, you’ll make it!”

The start of the trail up the Yapola River was dotted with craters, the result of rain-loosened boulders toppling from the cliffs. The walls on either side of the river were unstable conglomerate stone, remnants of the 600-million-year-old Tethyan Sea floor which, over time, the earth’s tectonic plates had pushed 5,000 metres towards the sky.

Farther on the canyon narrowed, and in the distance, through curls of mist, I saw boulders somersaulting over the trail. Strangely, the wallop of the careening rocks carried above the water’s roar. Near Phenjilla village, half way to Hanupatta, a drowned yak floated by, its dark coat glistening on a bloated corpse. Its stiff legs caught in the branches of a half-submerged tree. The right front hoof wagged in the current, a taut, controlled movement, like the queen waving from her golden coach.

Then, three kilometres after Phenjilla, I was faced with the inevitable. Before me, a gaping metre-and-a-half-wide hole had severed a section of the trail that had been built with wood and stone directly into the cliff wall. The narrow path was disintegrating. Loose stone on either side of the breach framed the river. The water below was dun-coloured and frantic. I had to decide, forward or retreat. Any other route to Zanskar would be longer and just as dangerous. My mother whispered in the back of my head, “Turn around, be safe,” but not for the first time I foolishly ignored her.

Stepping back twenty paces, I took a running leap. My body rose. I hung for a millisecond and landed – bam – two feet on solid ground, my nervous knees hammering like a sewing machine. I breathed deeply and leaned against the cliff to regain some composure.

I set off again, now dwelling in the sharpness that follows difficult experiences. The river was louder, the tenuous light gave the moist cliffs an even sheen, raindrops flickered on their descent.

A kilometre farther on my resolve was tested again. As I edged across a sloughing section of open trail the mucky surface moved, shifting towards the creek. I was moving with it. Simultaneously, from above, I heard the rifle crack of falling stone. I was trapped. If I moved I might destabilize the slope, but if I stayed where I was the falling rock could smash my skull. I couldn’t look up and lose my footing and in that moment of absolute exposure there was only one choice – faith.

I pressed my face into the mud, praying for protection, forgetting the Lord’s Prayer of my youth and repeating instinctively the only mantra I knew, Om Mani Padme Hum.

One second, maybe two, and a trio of rocks whizzed by, inches on either side of me. I glimpsed them landing, contained splashes in the churning river.

I waited and waited, still praying. The slope stopped moving and I pulled my mud-caked boots from the coagulated mess. Another hour of tense walking and the canyon opened out. The wind eased and my heart rate slowed.

I pitched my tent at the junction of the Yapola and Spung rivers on a small plateau close to the water – not too close as I was fearful of a sudden rise in the water level, but still far enough away from the cliffs and their falling debris. I set a pot of water boiling on the stove – coffee was what I really wanted. I sat just inside the vestibule of my tent, sipping the hot brew and listening to the crack and roar of water and stone hurtling down the canyon.

September 6

I was up early as I had a long day’s walk ahead. After instant coffee and oatmeal with lumpy milk powder and lots of sugar, the kind of breakfast that kept me going for hours, I packed quickly. It was almost automatic now how everything I needed was assembled, disassembled and neatly put away. By seven a.m. I was walking. The trail followed the Spung River west towards Hanupatta.

All morning the rain fell but by the time I reached the village, with the gain in altitude, it was falling as plump, billowing flakes of wet snow. The valley was blanketed with a pristine cover of white. I stopped in search of a hot drink, but at the tea stall people were too busy clearing the storm’s slushy mess to concern themselves with a thirsty foreigner.

The young owner of the tea stall pointed me towards a house where he said they would make me a hot drink. I wandered in the open door and found the old owner and his wife huddled in the only dry corner of their kitchen. Their hands clasped steel mugs of steaming rice wine, or chang as it’s known in Ladakh. They offered me a cup and I stayed for two. Two men and a woman, the grown sons and daughter, wandered in and out surveying the damage to the walls. None of them seemed to care that a stranger was in the family home drinking chang with their parents.

Ladakhi houses are built to endure cracking cold. Metrethick mud-brick walls create massive insulation and tiny windows hamper the entry of winter’s bitter winds. Adobe is the perfect material for that environment, but precipitation, a rarity on the north side of the Himalayas, is as decimating to earthen homes as fire is to wooden ones. In Hanupatta the houses were collapsing. Waterlogged roofs trembled on their birch branch trusses. The two old people were quiet, but I felt the need to reciprocate their hospitality with conversation and asked in Hindi about the state of the village. The old man broke into a grin, wrinkles multiplying around his mouth and eyes. “Rains come and some houses will break,” he said, “but we can build them again.” When I left they smiled and waved, shockingly nonchalant about their house disintegrating around them.

I stopped at the stupa on the edge of the village and was overtaken by a fast-walking man, his son and their four donkeys. The man stopped to catch his breath and sat on the stone bench at the base of the monument. When I asked why he was in such a hurry, he said his animals were needed in Photoksar, the next village, to assist in a relative’s barley harvest. He was in a rush. He stood to leave and I joined their modest procession.

Donkeys are not all-weather animals. With their knobby knees, tiny hoofs and swollen bellys, they look desperately out of place in a winter landscape. Any time we stopped the little beasts shivered uncontrollably.

It is twelve kilometres from Hanupatta to Photoksar and to help the little animals through the deepening snowdrifts the man was shovelling off the top six inches of cover. In such weather it seemed a manic trek, but the relative’s harvest would begin as soon as the melt was on and the man had promised to help.

It was five kilometres from Hanupatta just to the base of the 5,000-metre Sisir-la. We started the long climb but within an hour it became obvious the donkeys were reaching their physical limit. They would stop mid-trail breathing heavily, their eyes closed as if the view ahead disturbed them. Only stern words from the farmer moved the group onwards.

The trail steepened. Donkeys and humans were breathing in time.

The young boy rode the lead animal. He was as quiet as his father was vocal.

Sometime in that second hour I heard a soft thud behind me. I turned to see the third animal in the line collapsed in knee-deep snow. The man shook his head, turned around and dropped to his knees. He murmured words of encouragement but the animal only replied with wheezing gasps. Its leg muscles were contracting violently. The father began to massage the donkey’s legs and talked to it as if addressing an injured child. The son sat calmly on his mount, unblinking. The three other mules stared mutely at their compatriot. Eventually, the broken donkey climbed gingerly to its feet, snow hanging in clumps from its matted coat. It was the end. The man looked at me and raised his hands, palms to the sky. He had to surrender to the elements. If the donkeys were to die there was no point in going on. So, with a shake of his head, the entourage turned and moved in slow motion back the way they came.

In silence I continued on, following the hoofprints made by a yak the day before through deeper and deeper snowdrifts. It was late afternoon, the sky had cleared and shadows were becoming long and distorted. The top of the pass was nowhere in sight.

The tracks became my focus. I followed them doggedly, one foot in front of the other, each step gaining altitude, each movement requiring more and more effort. I felt a symbiosis between my breath and the steps. At the start of the climb I had been taking one strong breath for every two steps, then it was one breath for every single step. Eventually, with the altitude, I was breathing during the step and then breathing again before initiating the next motion. I was moving slower and slower but the pace didn’t bother me; it was a meditation.

I imagined the freezing air making the transition from atmosphere to energy, first passing the moist channels of my nose and mouth, travelling down the fleshy passage of my trachea, filling my lungs and then, in the tiniest recesses of the capillaries and alveoli, transferring oxygen into blood and bringing energy out to my energy-starved legs. At that altitude I recognized inhalation as a nurturing pulse through my thighs and calves.

On what I thought was the last pitch to the summit, the yak prints veered left and moved away perpendicular to the fall-line of the slope. Even the yak had decided that reaching Photoksar was not worth the effort. I was alone, plowing through thigh-deep snow in the mellow light before sunset.

Where the yak had turned was not the last pitch; it took another hour to reach the ice-crusted stupa that marked the divide. I was drained. I sat on the monument’s top step to catch my breath. I stood up, took off my pack, lay down on the ice-crusted snow and from there watched the last minutes of the sun’s descent. Copper-pink wisps of cloud flitted north. The sun edged behind a line of guardian crags. In its wake a frigid border swept across the tilted plane of the pass and then there was darkness.

The temperature dived. I threw on my pack and raced straight down from the pass. Gravity was working with me. The energy I had lost on the climb returned in the thrill of the descent. I threw myself down the hill, using the metre of fresh snow as a brake. With each step my feet drove deep into the drifts and my body leaned forward against the packed snow. The moon had pulled up from behind the ridge and the slope was bathed in a pale glow. I was being pulled as fast as my legs would carry me. If I fell it was a soft landing, and I would let out a whoop, roll over the top of my pack and be thrown back to standing.

I reached an open stream, the first signs of the Photang River, and followed the trickle to an open patch of shaly ground. The ascent had taken five hours, but I reached the campsite only forty minutes after leaving the pass.

I pitched my tent by touch, scooped frigid water to make my rice and dal, then wrapped my sleeping bag around me as I ate. The temperature was still falling and if I concentrated I could hear the snap and crack of stones and plants, the water in them freezing and expanding, pushing out against minerals and living cells. Even in that frozen space the world was moving.

September 7

I woke without hearing the tinkling of the creek. It was the first week of September and already moving water was freezing. I slept until nine a.m. – today would be an easy fifteen-kilometre trek. I had learned from crossing the Sisir-la that it was folly to attempt the next pass, the even higher Singe-la, in the slushy conditions of late afternoon. Instead, I would camp at the base and climb the next morning at first light on the icy crust.

I arrived at Photoksar to clear skies and sunshine, made doubly bright by the veneer of snow. The village is the most spectacular on the northern route to Zanskar. It clings precariously to a cliffside above the turbulent Photang River and looks ready to crash into the gorge with the slightest shudder of Mother Earth. Pragmatism is behind its positioning; the most fertile land lies behind the village and so, to optimize cultivated space, homes have been moved to the edge of the abyss.

Photoksar had suffered badly in the storms. I saw, in open areas, stalks of barley crushed under the weight of drifts. On the slopes people were shovelling snow to expose patches of grass for hungry goats. The animals had, for the past three days, been on minimal diets culled from stocks set aside for the long winter and now, with the change in weather, every effort was being made to provide fresh feed. Any pasture exposed now meant another day’s fodder during the lean days on the far side of the cold season.

I thought about stopping in Photoksar but the village was empty because everyone was in the fields so I kept walking. Just east of the village the Photang River joins the larger Yapola River and I followed it south towards the Singe-la.

I topped a small hill not far out of the village that offered views down the broad valley towards the base of the pass. Knowing I didn’t have to race the sun to the top made for an easy walk. I stopped frequently, caught in the silence, so quiet after the residents’ frenetic activity in Photoksar and my own efforts climbing the Sisir-la. Nothing stirred in the rock-walled amphitheatre; there were no echoes from far-away cliffs, not even the rush of a river. Between the rocks, deep pink clusters of stonecrop bloomed.

Overhead ravens soared, jet-black spirits, spiralling up and down on invisible drafts. Usually they are raucous aerial gymnasts, but that day even they were silent. I tracked them skywards until their silhouettes disappeared into blue. From that height they must have been able to see from the Indus to the Vale of Kashmir. That was fitting because in Tibetan culture ravens are far-seeing clairvoyants, oracles with the ability to predict the future, and in every village there are men and women skilled at interpreting the black bird’s mystic utterings.

My thoughts were broken close to the end of the valley as two Zanskari men caught up to me. Tenzin was headed to Lingshed village and Padma to Nerax. Both planned to tackle the pass at dawn. We pushed on together.

Zanskar is the farthest western extent of Tibetan Buddhist influence. Zanskari is a Tibetan dialect and Buddhism originally came to the valley from Kashmir possibly as early as 200 B.C.E.. The earliest stone carvings have been traced to the Kushan period (100 B.C.E. to 500 C.E.). But Zanskar (and Ladakh) were overrun in the seventh century by pre-Buddhist Tibetans from the west who imposed their animistic Bon religion.

The influence of Buddhism was revived in Zanskar in the eighth century when Tibet was converted to Buddhism. Between the tenth and eleventh centuries, two lineages of monarchs were established in Zanskar and the major monasteries of Karsha and Phuktal were founded. This independence lasted until the fifteenth century when the valley came under the influence of Ladakh, and when Ladakh became part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir in 1842, so too did Zanskar.

It was good to be with two such cheerful men. Padma, the younger, had just returned from New Delhi and was eager to practise his English. He chatted away with little regard for grammatical intricacies. I liked his rendering of the language, as he crafted spontaneous constructions anytime the English eluded him. Our discussion became an exercise in improvised vocabulary.

“Mr. Jono,” he would say, “we are hoping with most gandatca that you will Apti be coming with Tenzin and muchta to our homes.”

I rolled his words over my tongue, imagining new meanings, searching for linguistic relationships, replaying the game that must have initiated my own first understanding of the language forty years before.

Padma and Tenzin were planning to camp in a small shepherd’s hut and invited me to stay with them. When we arrived I saw the shelter was four walls of loose stone. The roof was strung with branches and the men had brought their own tarp to throw on top of it. I declined their offer as the size of the hovel would have meant we would be sleeping on top of one another. But I happily joined them for dinner.

I pitched my tent, laid my sleeping bag out and returned to the hut. Tenzin stoked the yak dung fire until bitter, white smoke obliterated our view of each other. Then he got down to the business of making thukpa. Thukpa in Zanskari means soup but it covers a wide variety of the dish, from fragrant glass noodle broths to the doughy mass of yak cheese stew my friend prepared that night. The meal was complemented by two bottles of chang that Tanzin produced from his rucksack.

We laughed and joked late into the night; the men were full of stories. Any impressions I may have harboured about the peaceful Buddhists of Ladakh and Zanskar were comically challenged that night as Padma told me of his favourite brothels and prostitutes in New Delhi and Tenzin, with Padma interpreting, gave us stories of his time in the Indian Army and the regular alcohol-fuelled brawls he had gotten into with other soldiers. Exhausted, I excused myself long before they were ready for bed.

Outside silver-fringed clouds drifted by a gibbous moon. In my slightly drunken state I searched for ravens, winged silhouettes against the pale light. I breathed deeply, cold air touched by ice, the taste of glaciers. I slipped into my nylon cocoon. Padma and Tenzin’s rowdy shouts quietened as I drifted to sleep.