Chapter 7 Harvest

October 17

I left Tabo without visiting all nine temples. The fear that had nagged me when I returned to the Sug Lhakang in the afternoon, that of spoiling what I had already experienced, returned when I thought about the other temples. I didn’t want to dilute what I had felt in the Sug Lhakang by rushing around eight other temples in a single day. Tabo is something special and I know I will return when there is time to give all the temples the respect they deserve.

I had a leisurely breakfast of tea and chapatis with the mother and youngest daughter of the guest house family before I left Tabo. The mother generously gave me the leftover bread for my lunch.

Back on the road I was surprised by the almost complete lack of traffic. The route wound gently along the Spiti River. Tightening cliffs channelled it on, pushing it faster and faster towards its meeting with the Sutlej River. At one point in the morning a gang of goldfinches bounded by me, undulating in a single mass, their chirpy song mingling with the water’s noise.

Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh, India

I traced the river another twenty kilometres east to where it was joined by a creek from the north and followed this upstream towards the village of Giu. The creek’s passage was a narrow winding valley which widened after six kilometers, so I could see the village in the distance. In the opening the wind howled from the north. I leaned into it and was relieved when I reached the shelter of the village buildings. At one of the first houses a lady waved me over and using sign language invited me in for tea.

It was an odd cup of tea. Her house was, I think, the village post office, although I saw no sign outside. Red boxes secured with huge medieval locks lay in one corner, tossed on the dirt floor were sacks bulging with the squared-off shapes of envelopes, and cardboard boxes secured with twine created an unsteady wall near the doorway.

I sat in a wooden chair on one side of the room. She poured me sugary chai from a stainless steel thermos and took a seat behind a rickety wooden desk. Behind her on a mattress on the floor two babies cried and cried. She ignored them and after pouring the tea, ignored me, not saying a word the entire time I was inside the house.

The wind beat against the building using anything not battened down to make a noise. I drank the tea quietly while she wrote things in a hardbacked ledger. When I finished I stood to go, but I wasn’t sure if she expected me to pay for the tea. I put my hand in my pocket searching for money and she stopped me with a look that would have set fire to a brick house. She stood and opened the door for me to leave.

I’d come to Giu because of rumours I’d heard, from as far back as Kaza, that the mummified body of a lama had been discovered in the vicinity. Local legend had it that the Indian Army had been digging a drainage ditch around its camp and had unearthed the body. Nobody I asked had any more details.

On her doorstep I asked the lady in Hindi where I might find the mummy and she pointed to a knoll above the fields where a white shack tottered in the gale. I thanked her and she nodded. Inside, the children were still crying.

Outside, on the right side of the front door, a huge black, roughly carved wooden phallus, a sign of protection, hung from the eaves. Its tip was painted red, its base girdled by a thick, black bush of leftover cassette tape – pubic hair. The celluloid ruffled in the breeze. It looked remarkably organic.

Clouds had rolled in and powder snow bucked in the squally air. In the pastures men were tilling cold, grey soil with wooden plows. They moved slowly, shouting at their yaks in the rhythmic singsong way that’s common throughout the Himalayas. Snow pigeons hopped amongst their feet, foraging for passed over seed. As I neared them the farmers smiled and touched their foreheads in greeting.

Up on the hillock, inside the corrugated steel shack, was a low wood and glass case surrounded by a platform for circumambulation. I stooped down to look inside the display. There on a base of mud, draped with silk scarves and semiprecious stones, was a shrivelled human body. I had seen Egyptian mummies in a museum as a child, but at Giu, 3,000 metres up in the Himalayas, the perfect shrunken body seemed entirely out of place.

It was obviously the remains of a man. The body sat upright in a cross-legged position. His right hand, tight against his body, was frozen in the attitude of counting a string of prayer beads that would have disintegrated over time. His shoulders were hunched forward to frame a slight, bony chest. Even though the skin was tight and wrinkled, I could see his face was frozen in a look of weary satisfaction, the corners of his mouth tipped upwards in the slightest of smiles. I imagined the lama serenely passing from this life, counting his prayers, in the clear light of meditation.

For many dedicated Tibetan lamas that is exactly what happens, because death is the focus and culmination of their life’s practice. In the Nyingma school’s teaching, the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the transition from this life to the next is described in exhaustive detail. For those who understand and apply the teaching, death unfolds not as a tragic end but as a transition from this life to the next. By approaching the body’s end with a calm and informed mind, by seeing it for what it is, a manifestation of impermanence, death becomes something not to fear but to resolutely accept. I returned to the monk’s ever so slight smile. Death is a lesson.

Gareth, like the monk, passed from this life with a look on his face that spoke of a gentle exit. I will never know the fear he confronted in those awful minutes while hanging onto the shattered hull of the rowing shell or the thoughts that possessed him when his body finally gave out and slipped quietly away. I can’t dwell on those images; the pain is too much.

What I hold onto is the face I saw in the cold light of the hospital morgue. It was so relaxed, no wrinkles or lines, his skin pale to the colour of snow, his mouth a thin line of blue with his lips curved ever so slightly upwards in a half-smile.

People say that in the later stages of hypothermia a feeling of warmth comes over you. I can see him remembering a warm summer’s night treeplanting in northern Canada, a group of tired friends gathered around a sparking blaze, the atmosphere full of satisfaction and potential. Or even better, I think of him imagining himself as a child holding tight against the warmth of our mother’s skin, her tender heat around and through him, his body attached to the one who loved him most.

That’s how I imagine his last moments – warm and full of love. I saw that in the expression on his face. It’s not that of someone dreading the end; it’s the face of a man resigned to the unavoidable and ready for what the next stage would bring. Gareth had realized what we all know deep inside us – that death is inevitable, that this passing will come no matter how hard we pull away from it. He saw his time was now and let himself drift softly out of this life.

I left the drafty shack. Outside snowflakes blustered. I retraced my steps through the village and down the creek. The temperature was dropping rapidly and the stream was now edged in spider-webbed patterns of ice.

My campsite at the lower end of Giu Creek was a tiny island. I pitched my tent surrounded by the stream; water rushed by inches from the door. I had reached the spot by leaping a ford of ice-caked boulders and as the sun disappeared I watched from the vestibule as their glassy coating paled and thickened. Then came night and the sky was splashed with the diamond streak of the Milky Way, so dense I could have grabbed a handful. I had never seen so many stars.

That night the temperature plummeted and when I woke the little river had been reduced to a trickle encased in ice. I opened the door to see a sparkling, crystal-gilded world where everything from the swaying grasses to my tent’s fly sheet was shimmering with frozen spray. It was beautiful but biting cold. I rushed to pack and warm myself with movement.

October 18

Back on the main route by the Spiti River I found the road had been freshly paved. On the even surface I didn’t have to worry about twisting an ankle and moved briskly, feeling the synchronicity of legs and arms and heart and lungs, letting my mind wander. But in the hamlet of Sumdo this got me into trouble.

The little village is the checkpost where the road branches northeast to Tibet. With India and China on questionable terms the road is closed and the soldiers were edgy. As I entered the village I made the moronic blunder of taking a wrong turn and walking directly into an army camp. Suddenly I was surrounded by three gun-toting infantrymen shouting at me in Hindi. I was inside a barbed-wire fence. It was obvious that something was seriously wrong and I threw my arms up in surrender. The troops marched me off to their commander’s office, their chests puffed out with the pride of having captured an “alien.”

The officer was grave but congenial. Interestingly, he didn’t want to give me his name. Maybe it was some kind of need-to-know security situation on the border, or maybe he was worried this tourist could cause him headaches higher up the chain of command. We talked in English and I tried to explain I had committed a dundering mistake, that I had walked into their barracks by accident and I’d be happy to excuse myself as quickly as possible.

He told me that unfortunately that was not possible because his men had “caught” me and a report would have to be written. For now the Inner Line Permit, the piece of paper issued by the local Chief of Police in Kaza entitling me to be in an area so close to the border, would have to be verified, and until then I would remain in detention.

I was going to jail. I asked how long the proceedings would take and he replied jauntily, “Not so long.”

From experience I’d learned that “Not so long” in India can mean anywhere from one hour to one week. I handed him my permit and was escorted away.

This was a particularly uncomfortable situation because to insure I had enough time to walk through both Spiti and Kinnaur district to the south I had doctored the dates on my permit from the maximum allowable one week to two weeks. I was extremely nervous that the police commissioner in Kaza would verify the documents had been tampered with. With India’s infatuation with paperwork, this discovery could lead to a very serious situation.

The detention room was hardly a cell. It was more lodging for visiting officers. It had a clean-sheeted bed, a side table, an unbarred window and a radio tuned to a cricket game somewhere far to the south. The only jail-like element was the guard who sat in the opposite corner, an archaic wooden-stocked rifle on his lap, khaki woolen watch cap pushed slackly back on his head. I wouldn’t even have noticed him if he hadn’t had the uneasy habit of staring at me for minutes on end and then loudly clearing the phlegm from his throat. These leering fits were broken every half hour or so when he would jump up from his chair, rifle dropping to his side, and inquire, “Tee, sah?”

The first time he did this it took me a moment to realize that he was offering his prisoner tea. My chai arrived in a china cup and saucer, the sugar in its own caddy. My guard drank from a chipped earthenware mug. I was being treated more as a V.I.P. than an inmate, but as the first hour led to the second and then into the third it was difficult not to imagine unpleasant scenarios. What could the commanding officer and the police commissioner be talking about?

By the fourth hour my guard had gotten over his distant inquisitiveness and had started to ask questions in simple English. “You like cricket?” “You have wife, child?” “Your work, what?”

We were actually getting along quite well. Then the captain entered, jolly and smiling. “Oh, Mr. Lineen, most sorry to take so long, but border communications are always so difficult.” He handed back the permit.

He said, “Everything is most definitely in order. Thank you so much,” and promptly invited me to lunch. I declined, anxious to leave the place in case they wanted to double-check my papers. I exited in a rush, issuing thank-yous and receiving a stiff salute from my tea-toting guard.

I walked out of the gates of the camp as fast as I could, not looking back, keeping my eyes to the road. I didn’t stop in the village and kept on walking until dusk set in. Then, still paranoid that the authorities would discover my forging, I walked up off the road five hundred metres until I found a small copse of birch trees and there, hidden from the road, I laid my sleeping bag down.

October 19

I was up early. I was still worried about the police, but I would be walking the road most of the day, so if they really wanted to catch me it wouldn’t be that difficult. I tried not to think about them and focused on walking. At Sumdo the Spiti River makes a dramatic 90-degree turn to the south. With each new tributary it grows more powerful and near Ganfa village its full force is channelled through an impressive gorge. The canyon walls are an aggregate of sandstone, feldspars, magmatites and loose granite slabs. It’s an incredibly unstable backdrop to National Highway 22, which in some places is cut directly into the canyon walls.

Sumdo also marks the border between Lahaul and Spiti district and Kinnaur district. Again Kinnaur is a Tibetan-influenced region within India. It has its own dialect and most of the population are Tibetan Buddhists.

At the village of Khabo the Spiti River merges and is absorbed by the Sutlej River. The Sutlej is the farthest east and, at 1,500 kilometres, the longest of the Indus River’s tributaries. It originates from Rakas Lake near the base of Mount Kailash in southwestern Tibet. From there it flows west and crosses the Shipki-la into India. Through Kinnaur the river quickly loses altitude and it is through this section that the Sutlej stakes its claim as the fastest river in the Himalayas. At Khabo it is a swirling, whitewater mass of curls and eddies, thick and grey with the earth of Tibet, completely untamed, violent in its rush to get to the Indus and the Arabian Sea.

At Khabo I had tea at a stall near the road and chatted in Hindi to the wide-eyed boy who served me. The owner had gone home for a siesta and the young boy, Choti, a nickname no doubt as it simply means small in Hindi, was excited to make me a cup of tea on his own. The boy looked to be ten or eleven years old. He was slightly built with a lean face, a thick crop of black hair and the dark skin of someone from the southern side of the mountains. He told me he was from Bihar state, his family was poor and he had come from his home with the man who owned the chai stall to work as a helper.

The owner had been on pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya, the town in Bihar where the Buddha achieved enlightment. Bodh Gaya is the most important of the four main holy sites for Buddhists (the others being Lumbini in Nepal where the Buddha was born, Sarnath near Varanasi, where he gave his first teaching, and Kushinagar, where he died). Every year hundreds of thousands of Buddhists from around the world make the journey to Bodh Gaya to circle the Bodhi tree. It was under such a tree, a long-limbed sacred fig, that the Buddha vowed to sit and meditate until he gained a higher state of consciousness and after forty-nine days of concentration he achieved his goal.

Choti told me how his father had approached the chai shop-owner and asked him to take the boy because the family was too poor to feed him. Taking an unpaid job in a village thousands of kilometres away was the only way he could survive. It seemed strange to me that Choti was so pragmatic about something that could loosely be defined as slavery. But the boy defended the chai shopowner, saying he was a fair man who had taught him to read and write and fed him as well as he did his own family. The boy could leave at any time, but had no money for bus fare or the desire to leave Khabo at present.

“I am learning to count money. This will help me in the future,” he said. Choti missed his mother and brothers and sister but said that if he was with them now he would be hungry, so it would be harder for him and them.

When it was time to pay I gave him a large tip. Choti was excited at the money and said he would say a prayer for my safe return to my family. As I left I saw him lighting a stick of incense and waving it in front of the brightly coloured postcard pictures of Buddha and the Hindu god Shiva that hung side by side on the mud-brick wall behind the tea stall’s stove.

Five kilometres from the village, with no houses or fields in sight, I came across three old ladies sitting by the roadside. They weren’t chatting, only sitting quietly, just being together. Two were kneading bone prayer beads between their gnarled fingers, while mantras fell unconsciously from their lips. The third was spinning a wooden-shafted prayer wheel of copper and silver with two hands. She repeated her mantras so loudly they were easy to hear above the river’s roar. I shouted, “Tashi Delek,” which means hello and good luck in Tibetan. They looked up together and returned the greeting, with gap-toothed smiles. For no reason they set me laughing and as I moved away I could hear them too, chuckling and talking amongst themselves, their meditation happily interrupted.

Tibetan Buddhist practice amongst most lay people is very different than the rituals followed by the monks and nuns. Generally people gauge their devotion by the amount of prayers they repeat. Everywhere in the Himalayan Buddhist world you see men and women, generally older people, carrying their prayer wheels, clicking through their prayer beads or circling stupas and monasteries while reciting mantras.

I like this idea of movement and prayer. Around holy sites, Bodh Gaya or the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala, for instance, there is a constant stream of people. They move clockwise – the flow of life – around the particular shrine while talking in groups or just walking alone. What has struck me, especially about the older people and this practice is that they continue on with whatever conscious business they have, conversing with friends, talking on mobile phones, even reading a book, while subconsciously repeating prayers and spinning their prayer wheels. Their religious practice is something integral to their daily lives, a constant experience.

This perpetual experience is something I have found vital in my life. Gareth’s death, of course, is a continual backdrop in my existence and over time it has moved from heartbreak to understanding. But similarly for me now marriage and children are constants that have taken me to depths and gifted me with sublime joy. Writing too – the truth of a story only develops through long and intense consideration. Running from something never brings comprehension. Consciously practising in the intimacy of what you want to understand is the surest path to wisdom.

I camped that evening on a small, irrigated plateau between the grey cliffs that held in the river. From above, on the road, it had looked to be a wild grove of rhododendron and willow, but when I climbed down and reached the flat ground I pressed through a curtain of young alder trees and found myself in a marijuana plantation.

Huge drooping, five-fingered leaves of cannabis indica waved languorously in the breeze. The air was full of their slightly sour aroma. I sat down wondering whose secret it was. I thought about maybe moving on as it would not have been good to be there if the owner decided it was time to harvest the crop. But it was almost dark. I didn’t think they would come in the night and so set about making my dinner. It was another brilliantly clear evening and I laid my sleeping bag down between the almost tropical looking plants. Sleep came to me accompanied by the thick resinous scent of dope, a smell completely alien to the fragrant simplicity of the high-altitude desert.

October 20

Villages drifted by and the road seemed not quite real. Maybe it had something to do with the clouds that had rolled in, or the stomach ache I had recently developed. Maybe it was my lack of company. Mostly I attributed my uneasiness to the road itself. Dead animals where crushed and splayed across its surface, blackened motor oil pooled in its depressions and convoys of transport trucks shook its foundations. Fifty metres on either side was a different world, one shaped by nature. In that fragile high-altitude desert I came to view the line of crumbling blacktop as an unsewn tear on the landscape.

Feeling a bit sorry for myself I arrived in the town of Pooh. I had been looking forward to this visit. The explorer, mystic, and artist Lama Anagarika Govinda had described the village in his 1947 book, The Way of the White Clouds, as “a Shangri- la.” Unfortunately, what I saw from the road did nothing to brighten my spirits. Another razor-wired army camp graced Pooh’s outskirts and from there cement and corrugated steel shacks extended to a bus stand that was merely a garbagestrewn widening in the road.

Sixty years before Lama Govinda had described a verdant oasis, but all I saw were unstable slopes, a few spindly trees and diesel spills mottling asphalt and stone. I dragged myself into the chai shop for another sickly sweet milk tea and asked the owner where I could find a guest house. He wiped his greasy hands on a sweaty singlet and pointed up the hill.

“Upper village guest house. Maybe!”

The upper village lay five hundred vertical metres above the road. I had already walked thirty-five kilometres that day and was not relishing the climb, but I’d promised myself I would spend a night in Lama Govinda’s Shang-ri-la and so tossed my knapsack on and pulled myself upwards. The thought of the ascent proved more painful than the climb and within forty minutes I was standing outside the public works department guest house where a few helpful locals tried to find the elusive caretaker. He came with a wide smile and quickly showed me a grubby single room with a shared toilet that had been blocked for weeks then stated a price that was five times what it was worth. He claimed the guest house was the only tourist accommodation in Pooh. It was obvious why he was smiling. I needed rest but the man was so unctuous, I knew I’d feel better walking beyond the village and putting my sleeping bag down amongst the rocks. So I said goodbye and went in search of food.

Passing a construction site on the edge of the old town I asked the foreman in Hindi if he could direct me to a restaurant. He smiled, displaying a full set of gold teeth, and put his hand on my shoulder. “Friend, it looks like you need somewhere to lie down rather than a plate of food.” He gave me directions, first to a restaurant and then to the town’s only private inn, a hostel that seemed to have slipped the mind of the guest house caretaker. Then in mid-sentence he smiled again and said, “You don’t need directions. The ladies will escort you.”

I could see nothing of these ladies until I followed his gaze downwards where a pair of dwarf twins in immaculate Kinnauri costumes – black woolen, ankle-length dresses and embroidered shawls in green and red – stood beside me. They smiled, and they too had glimmering sets of gold teeth. The foreman talked to them in what must have been Kinnauri, the ladies giggled like teenagers, then each grabbed one of my hands and hauled me off in search of the guest house. So there I was, beyond tired, a six-foot-two grown man shouldering a huge red pack, being dragged through winding village streets by a pair of chattering four-foot-six matrons.

My escorts were a local good luck charm. Everyone we met said a respectful hello and tried to touch the ladies’ foreheads in blessing. The sisters recoiled and screamed in mock horror, but left each encounter laughing and smiling. They spoke no English but were constantly pointing at things along the way, chattering to me in Kinnauri, giving me, I presumed, a guided tour of the town.

We arrived at the door of a large house. The ladies knocked loudly. There was no sign indicating it was a hotel. The owner appeared, looked me up and down, smiled at the twins and motioned us inside. He led us to a large ten-bed dormitory room where the sisters began jumping up and down on the mattresses. This was their way of testing the bedding. The owner begged them to stop and after a few minutes they deemed one fit for my worn bones. Then, standing on the bed so they stared the owner in the eye, arms folded on their tiny chests, chins jutting out assertively, they haggled a price. A rate was agreed upon, ten rupees. It was twenty times less than the government guest house. With that they leaped from the bed, bowed, put their palms together in the gesture of prayer, and left.

Had it all been a dream?

I laid out my sleeping bag and was settling in when I heard the sound of drums and horns coming from a building on the far side of the village. From the window I saw thick white smoke two hundred metres away and heard shouting children. When I asked the manager, he replied there was a mela, a festival, underway at the temple. I had arrived on the day of the harvest celebrations. The thought of the festivities was like a shot of caffeine. I grabbed my sweater and rushed off through the alleys.

I had been pleasantly surprised as I’d followed the ladies to the hotel; the narrow lanes of Pooh were the antithesis to the lower town’s dereliction. Many were lined with apple and apricot trees, some were cobbled, others fronted traditional wood and stone high-roofed houses. I realized that Lama Govinda had arrived on the high route from the north, through orchards and barley fields. In his day there was no drivable road to Pooh.

At the temple, a whitewashed, two-storey building with windows that looked down on the village, most of the townsfolk had assembled around the edges of an open, football pitch-size courtyard. They created a human perimeter around a single line of about eighty men and women moving in a slow, deliberate promenade. The dancers were joined by touch, right hands on the shoulder of their forward neighbour, left hands holding a scarf that linked the entire group. The crowd moved together, everyone stepping methodically in time to a drumbeat. The dancers sang in a high-pitched chant accompanied by bass drums, cymbals and horns. The line shuffled from one foot to the other, their bodies connected as one. The sum of them all undulating around the courtyard looked like an inebriated serpent.

In the centre was a small stone pillar, old and worn, carved with what looked like Sanskrit letters and guarded by two stern-faced matriarchs. Around it piles of smoldering juniper emitted clouds of aromatic incense. Something clutched my right forearm. I looked to see a wildly drunk man grabbing my hands and forming them into a cup. Into it he poured cold chang. His look said, “Drink, drink” and I did. He quickly refilled my hands with more liquor.

The whole spectacle was one of affable debauchery, swaying men, dancing women and yelling kids racing around among the grown-ups’ feet. Amidst it all a rank of old lay lamas, some as drunk as their congregation, were attempting to guide the festivities.

After my fifth round of chang I was handed a scarf and a green-banded, woolen pillbox Kinnauri hat and forcibly enlisted into the line dance. The steps were only difficult in their delayed movement and I whispered a monotone facsimile of the song. My positioning in the line was pushed forward until, to the delight of the onlookers, I became the leader of the chain.

I was caught in the harvest-time madness. I was bobbing to a half-time, cacophonic rhythm, heading a line of revelling ecstatics, laughing, shouting, holding hands.

The mela was reaching a sensual fever pitch, but my legs were shaking from exhaustion. I relinquished my leadership and moved outside the inner echelon and there I saw an ancient fellow with an unforgettable face, a combination of Mahatma Gandhi and George Burns. He gave me a huge wavering smile and handed me his bottle of chang. I took a few shots, lowered the bottle, and turned to see a hundred faces staring at us. The music had stopped. My initial reaction was that I’d committed some grave indiscretion by drinking from the same bottle and tried to move backwards through the people who had pulled in around us. The crowd, however, was not staring at me but at the old man.

A body brushed by me. The totally inebriated old fellow was escorted by a monk to a small stage on the left of the shrine building where an assistant fed him more chang. An older lama joined them, chanting mantras and throwing blessed barley in the air. In the background the sun was setting. The pale blue sky was stroked in salmon pink. Without warning the old man dropped from standing to squatting. His head twisting back and forth at unnatural angles, he barked like a rabid dog and punched the earth with his fists. The crowd was absorbed by him. His pupils rolled back, exposing the whites of his eyes, and he let out a banshee wail, lifted his face to the blushing sky and threw his arms to the heavens.

Later that evening it was explained to me that the man was being possessed by the local earth goddess. The entity that the people of Pooh believed had infused everyone with harvest joy was about to manifest through him.

The monk who had assisted him onto the stage handed the medium a long, thin nail, the size of a very large hatpin. The old man fumbled with it, then pushed it easily through his left cheek until the tip was far outside his mouth. Not a drop of blood was spilt.

The crowd gathered tighter around the stage. Hundreds of people held out silk offering scarves and hollered questions as the old man now had the power of divination. The people accepted he was speaking from a higher state of consciousness. He stood and his assistant draped a cloak around him. The old man stamped his feet and did a quick jig almost like a mischievous child, waved his hands by his side, rolled his head loosely back and forth and shouted answers to the crowd’s appeals. This went on for fifteen minutes and then, with one giant, very controlled step, he dropped down from the stage.

It was only then that I realized a parallel process was underway in the opposite corner of the compound, where a long-haired, rag-clad man was simultaneously being entered by the spirit. I turned to the man next to me and asked in Hindi what was going on. Putting his arm fraternally around me my neighbour pointed at the two shamans and said, “One Buddhist mother. One Hindu mother.”

The oracles staggered towards each other in an awkward shuffle and when they came face to face they performed a slow-motion, mirror-image dance, pulling their feet high and stomping in time with some internal rhythm. It was a dance of togetherness, an embrace by two facets of the same goddess.

The population of Pooh then lined up behind the mediums and formed an unbroken line. They followed the hunched, granny-dancing shamans on a drum- and horn-accompanied circumambulation of the temple. I was dragged happily into the order.

Maybe that’s what it’s like to be tossed in with the faithful rounding the Ka’baa in Mecca or to follow Tibetan nomad pilgrims in their circling of Mount Kailash. Individuality is consumed and enhanced by a whole. For the twenty minutes we circled the courtyard I was lost in the movement.

Finishing the circuit the oracles returned to centre stage and there the chain of people disintegrated into chaos. The mediums returned to their respective corners where the goddess released them from their bondage. Wrenching convulsions ripped them both, as if something was being torn from their bellies; they rolled on the ground kicking, grunting and beating the earth with their fists. Then it stopped and they lay flat out, drained, their arms and legs splayed wide. Eventually, the monks picked them up and physically dragged them off to the side. In the aftermath they sat alone, looking stunned and confused. Around them, in groups staggering back home, the party raged on.

I was left in a small huddle of men who seemed to have adopted me. They all spoke English and were peppering me with questions. All I really remember was one man who kept asking over and over again whether I believed in the power of the oracle. I was drunk and exhausted, in no state to try to give an interpretation of what I had just seen. I told him the oracles appeared very powerful. He grinned and refilled my hands again with chang, then invited me to his house for dinner. It was dark and I had no idea where I would find food so I accepted.

Chander Negi was a small, very well-groomed, serious man, a banker on home-leave from the state capital of Shimla. I followed him, stumbling back up the village pathways to his family’s house. There his mother and sister greeted us and we were joined by one of his friends, Doctor Aggarwal, a resident at the local hospital. I was easily the drunkest of the group. The men and women were all, I discovered later, teetotallers, but Chander’s mother and sister happily refilled my glass with an unending supply of barley beer.

Even in my inebriation I was interested in what these two well-educated men thought of the shamanistic possession we had witnessed. They began by emphasizing how important it was to preserve local traditions, talking of the oracles as if they were museum pieces. But as the night wore on both Chander and his friend confessed to having asked personal questions of the spirits and both acknowledged that some of the predictions had come true. They said it was not fashionable for doctors and bank managers to believe in shamans and oracles but there was no reason to discard them.

Chander’s mother served dinner. I believe it was tsampa chapatis and several different curries, but my memory gets fuzzy at this point. I do remember Chander leading me back to the guest house, his arm barely reaching around my shoulder and me singing songs. I don’t remember which songs and I don’t remember if the guest house owner let us in or if the door was open. I do remember lying down on the bed and thinking it was very soft and that inside my sleeping bag was exactly where I wanted to be at that point in time.

October 21

Morning came quickly, and I rose with a thick head. Groggily, I stuffed my household back into my rucksack. I had a cup of tea, paid the guest house owner, took one last look at the temple and started walking. The clouds of yesterday had dissipated but in the deep valley of the Sutlej it was shady and cool. For me this was a gift. As I walked my head recovered from the hangover and by the time the sun had topped the ridges I felt as clear as the sky. I actually felt really good. Whether this was because my body reacted well to chang or because of the strange and wonderful things I’d witnessed the day before I don’t know.

The road moved around and over mountains, following the braided path of the river. Not long after I started a red-billed chough followed me for a kilometre, flying ahead, landing, turning to stare, then taking off again when I was two paces away. Up side valleys and at the crest of climbs I glimpsed far-off snow peaks. Below me, the river raced on. It cut a huge swathe through the crumbling mountains yet still managed to look inviting in its back waters and eddies.

The landscape was changing with trees appearing sporadically and patches of grass dotting the hills. The yaks that had grazed by the wayside were replaced by herd after herd of sheep and goats. I was dropping in altitude, moving down out of the alpine zone.

Ten kilometres down the river at the village of Kannum, I climbed off the road on a twisting trail that followed a small creek and arrived forty-five minutes later in a hamlet that wrapped around the hillside and into a lightly treed valley. The village fit the mountainside perfectly. Tight paths between buildings followed along the slope’s contours. The houses were multi-storied, wood and stone works of art. Their walls rose three metres, soundly constructed from layers of stone and squared-off logs. The horizontally laid wood was intricately carved with what looked like Celtic knot designs. The houses were like castles, immense, but built for living. Around the exteriors I could not find a single nail; the buildings were secured by friction, mass and craftsmanship.

I followed the alleys farther up in search of the gompa I had been told stood at the top of the village. Past apricot orchards and a pair of grandmothers weaving shawls on large, double-framed looms, I found the building on a south-facing slope overlooking the Sutlej. It was built in the same citadel style as the houses. People had told me it was, like Tabo, founded in the tenth century, but its positioning and fort-like construction was closer in style to monasteries I knew had been built in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries.

I entered the courtyard to find a sixteen-metre by sixteen-metre space enclosed by wooden balconies on three sides and on the fourth by the prayer room. Climbing the steps to the hall I found four wide-eyed, brightly painted guardian kings greeting me from the frescoed atrium. A flowerpot on the balcony spilled with purple and pink geraniums and golden marigolds. On the doubled-doored entrance was tacked a brass plaque, shiny against the sun-bleached wood. Its inscription brought a smile to my face.

Judit Gulantha

Georgy Norgady

Montreal ’92

Alexander Csoma de Koros

Judit Gulantha and Georgy Norgady are Hungarian/Canadian scholars who have traced the path of Csoma de Koros throughout the western Himalayas. To think that in some way I was tracing the legendary explorer brought a lightness to my steps.

I took off my pack and sat down on the balcony of the prayer hall, enjoying the sunshine. The doors were locked, but I didn’t feel the need to search out a keyholder. I had been into dozens of monasteries on the trek, and they had all been special in their own way, but Kannum for me was unique for the people who had been there before and for the sense of satisfaction I had just sitting on its front step. I lay there quietly for half an hour, my head on my pack, staring up at an eight-spoked Dharmacakra, or Wheel of Dharma, painted on the ceiling of the atrium above the main door. The paint was peeling and faded but the wheel was still prominent.

Wheels of dharma are everywhere in the Buddhist world because they symbolize the structure of the path to higher consciousness. The hub of the wheel represents discipline, the starting point of meditation. The wheel’s rim stands for mindfulness, the state of being which holds the practice together. The circular shape of the wheel refers to the perfection of the Buddha’s teachings and the eight spokes represent the noble eight-fold path, the steps of which are right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.

Eventually, I took my head off my pack, pulled the rucksack on and, with gravity helping, ran back down the hill past the village. A few kilometres south of Kannum, not far from the river, I found a campsite that was the perfect blend of mountain views and water at my feet. I made dinner, drank my tea and watched the sun set.

October 22

By mid-morning I had reached Moorang, a village nestled into the slope on the north side of the Sutlej. From a distance its houses were black and white checks against a coarse mantle of deciduous trees. Dominating the skyline on a knoll above the houses was the kila, the village’s ancestral fort.

I walked up and circled the abandoned stronghold. The view north and south took in kilometres of the Sutlej River. It would have been almost impossible to slip into the vicinity of Moorang without being detected from the fortress. The building had the same dimensions as a single family home but rose for six stories. It was more of a lookout than a fort. The walls were of a simple log construction, the timbers notched at their ends and slipped one on top of other. Some of the squared-off logs around the base were a metre and a half in diameter. The original trees would have been four times the size of any that I’d seen along the Sutlej.

I sat for a while enjoying a sip of water and watching inquisitive ravens circle the tower. They landed and perched on the upper parapet, staring at me, silently questioning my presence. More and more gathered until the parapet was filled, wing to wing, with large black birds. There were dozens of them staring at me. They sounded like a crowd of commuters in the London underground, the whoosh and screech of trains interspersed with the rumbling murmur of the people in a rush.

At the base of the knoll on which the kila was built I found, each an arm’s length from the other, a Buddhist stupa and a Hindu lingam. The lingam, a phallic-shaped stone placed vertically on a pedestal, is an abstract representation of the god Shiva, the Hindu personification of power. The positioning of the shrines indicated I was in a religious transition zone. The whitewashed monuments radiated in the sunshine, both draped in identical garlands of marigolds almost as if the same person was propitiating both traditions.

I pushed on down the Sutlej to Recong Peo, the capital of Kinnaur. It had been a hard day’s walk finished off by a long climb to the town. I arrived wearily at sunset.

Recong Peo is a prefabricated government enclave, a larger version of Padum with a maze of concrete paths and broken asphalt roads laid over a deforested, east-facing slope. I quickly found a guest house close to the bus stand; it had that feeling of messy transitoriness that most cheap hotels exude. In the café across the street I ordered rice and dal. The rice was brokengrained and without any of the nutty basmati aroma Indians prefer. The dal was watery and too salty.

I ate with an audience, as a group of men waiting for a night bus stared at me following every spoonful of rice that made its way to my mouth. One of the great differences between India and Western countries is that staring is not considered bad manners on the subcontinent. Being ogled at can even be a sign of respect, indicating the watchers are interested enough to stare. But being gazed at while I tried to eat my dinner was not what I wanted that evening. After a cup of tea and a plate of stale Indian sweets, I made my way across the bus park to my room. I fell asleep almost immediately. The bed smelled of stale beer and cigarette butts.

October 23

I was up before the hotel manager. He was a large man with a massive moustache who the night before had tried to shortchange me when I had prepaid for the room. At the desk downstairs I called for him and rang the little bell next to the register. A man I did not recognize came out from the kitchen. He looked dishevelled. His hair was standing on end and he smelled of whiskey, but he unlocked the front door for me. When I thanked him for getting up, he grunted and closed the door quickly.

Another long day was ahead because I hoped to reach Sangla village, thirty kilometres east in the Baspa Valley, by sunset. This day’s walk had dominated my thoughts for the past week, for it would be my first substantial gain in altitude since ascending the Kunzum-la in Spiti two weeks before.

The road twisted through the Sutlej gorge, jumping from side to side on a series of steel truss, cantilevered bridges. At Karcham village the Baspa River merges with the Sutlej. The main road follows the larger river south to Rampur and eventually the state capital Shimla. The road I wanted, which tracked the smaller river east up the tributary valley, climbs almost nine hundred metres vertically, is one-laned and switchbacks dramatically up the 20-degree slope. Hairpin turn after hairpin turn brings it higher. It was pleasant to walk, but nerve-wracking to drive and life-threatening to be a passenger in a sardine-packed local bus.

The route veered away from the line cut by the Baspa River, but returned to it when the gorge opened out ten kilometres before Sangla. The valley brought memories of Kashmir. There were orchards of bare-branched apple trees, crisp cool humid air and the mucky smell of fresh-plowed fields. The faces of the people were less Tibetan and more Caucasian. The houses and temples resembled the wood and stone styles I had seen in Srinagar, Kashmir. On both sides of the little river, towering snow peaks reached up to a cloudless sky. The peaks seemed too big for the narrow space, their flanks muscling into the curve of the valley. The flats along the river were checkered with fields and orchards and although they had already been harvested, it was the most fertile looking land I’d seen since the Kulu Valley.

In Sangla I found a room at an empty guest house on the edge of the town. The old lady who signed me in wore a beautifully embroidered pale woolen shawl. Its borders were patterned in orange and blue interlocking squares, while the body of the fabric featured text in Tibetan and Hindi-Devanagari script and images of stupas and buildings like the tall, mushroom-roofed Hindu timber temples of the valley. She offered to help carry my pack down the hall, but she looked about seventy years old and I insisted I could do it myself.

After Recong Peo it was a pleasure to be in that building. It was dusty and untidy, and an inordinate number of sheet metal trunks were stacked against the corridor walls, but the building was made of wood and stone and the place smelled like a forest. When I walked the hall the structure creaked like a ship bucking along in a light breeze. The window from my little room looked south over the river to the jagged line of sentry peaks that blocked the way from Himachal Pradesh to the state of Uttarakhand.

I went to the bazaar in search of food. The little market was centred around the bus stop, a circular stretch of road lined with wooden-fronted shops. People were staring at me but instead of gawking like open-mouthed, domesticated animals they shouted for me to come to their shops and join them for a cup of tea. I wandered the village’s few streets until well after dark, drinking chai, talking and eating sweets in small shops and restaurants.

The customers and owners were all interested in what I was doing in Sangla so late in the year. Tourists had started coming to the valley but by September the locals said all the foreigners had left. When I told them of my walk most of my new friends laughed. I think some of them thought it was a joke and others thought that I must be the joke for undertaking something so silly. Kamran, a young electrician with a jawline beard and a jean jacket two sizes too big for him, slapped me on the back and ordered me another tea, saying, “You need another chai, friend. You have a long way to walk.”

From Sangla I planned to move south over the 4,700-metre Rupin Ghatti (in Hindi ghatti means pass). Since the snows of early September I had been debating with myself where I could cross from Himachal Pradesh to Uttarakhand. The Rupin Ghatti is the most direct route but also the highest. I was worried that early autumn’s premature storms had left snow too deep to walk through. That evening I asked everyone I talked to what they thought about the state of the pass but no one could tell me the snow’s depth, or at what altitude it started. However, the shopkeepers, government officials and farmers I talked to had no reason to know that information. The shepherds were the only group who regularly used the pass, and in late October shepherds would not be spending their evenings drinking chai and eating sweets around the bus park in Sangla.

October 24

I was off early. The old lady was already out in her garden, bottle-feeding some infant goats. She waved and, because I liked her and felt the day had the makings of an adventure, I jumped in the air and clicked my heels. She laughed and waved some more. I dropped from Sangla to Baspa River and started upwards on a hard-packed trail. On the climb I constantly met men and women headed in the opposite direction loaded with bushels of firewood.

I was moving through the first real forest since leaving the Kulu Valley; giant chir pines and deodar cedars graced the draw. I was thrilled to see that the timbers for the kila fortress in Moorang were not history. Stately conifers, almost two metres across at their base, reached for the sky, while a soft bed of green needles lay underfoot. The understorey was cool and moist, so different from my regular midday refuge behind rocks or houses in the open, sunbeaten desert of Lahaul, Spiti, Zanskar and Ladakh. The forest was sheltering.

For the first time in weeks the horizon was out of view, and my focus moved inwards. I was off the road – no cars, no trucks, no crushed and bleeding animals. I was comfortable moving back into my steps. A resinous breeze whipped up from the needles blanketing the ground and cooled my damp forehead.

Where the giant trees thinned around 3,300 metres a group of houses appeared. It was a seasonal village unmarked on my map. The houses were uninhabited, and the fields down the hill from the buildings lay tilled and fallow. Soon they would be under snow. On the far side of the buildings a man was making tea over an open fire. I smelled burning cedar and long-boiled strong brew.

In sign language he invited me for a cup, mixing in sugar and fresh milk poured from an old whiskey bottle. We drank and he talked for five minutes in a local dialect I couldn’t understand. Eventually, when I could get a word in, he realized my incomprehension. He laughed and slapped me on the back. We finished our tea in silence.

Then I tried to ask him whether the pass was open by pointing upwards, saying, “Rupin Ghatti, Rupin Ghatti?” and holding my palms open in a gesture of inquiry. He broke into a smile and gave me the thumbs-up. This was great encouragement. I stood to leave and he shook my hand. I threw on my pack and he lay back on the thin grass, watching the wispy clouds reeling across the sky.

The trail levelled off, making the climb easier, and my fears of my body’s opposition to the grade melted in the sunshine. It was a delight to be away from the road, walking to higher ground. Mountain sounds came to me: the wind, chirping marmots, the crunch of loose stones underfoot.

The trail I had been following disappeared and I scaled an empty hillside. I was unsure of the route; my map was covered in dotted topographic lines indicating that the cartographers were not a hundred percent sure of the area’s terrain. My route-finding relied on intuition and the little I’d gleaned in the Sangla bazaar. By five p.m. I reached the snowline and still there was no sign of the pass. To the south, all around me, snowfields rose in a 180-degree arc. They were smooth, silken-looking curves of ice that ascended into the blue of the sky. My legs felt strong, but I was breaking through ice-crust into knee-deep snow. I decided to camp and cross early the following morning.

I pitched my tent on a snowy knoll. The rice and dal I had for dinner were made with melted ice. As I ate I watched the almost full moon rise and transform the soft contours of the snowfield into a flickering moonscape. With sunset the wind that had whistled off the pass softened until it was breathless, but out of the hush slight noises carried: rustling mice on ice-scabbed crust, the gravitational shift of the snow beneath my body, the beating of ravens’ wings. In daytime they would have drifted by, but in the thin, motionless air they came to me clearly. Restlessly, I drifted with them into the cold night.

October 25

I was up before six o’clock and walking soon after, but the sun hit the slope early and the crust was fracturing beneath me less than half an hour after I left camp. My pack felt heavier than normal and uncomfortably weighted to one side. I blamed my uneasiness on a poor night’s sleep caused by the bitter cold. The tightened hood of my mummy sleeping bag had been rimmed in ice when I woke.

It was two hours of slogging through knee-deep drifts before the ridgeline came into view and by eleven o’clock I was on the crest of the pass. I stood among haphazard stone cairns above a serac edge and looked far down into a black and white valley. But I was unsure if this was the Rupin Ghatti. After five hours of heavy walking and altitude-enhanced wishful thinking, I wanted it to be the pass but had to be certain. A mistake could cost me days of walking to return to my planned route.

Ten minutes of taking triangulation compass bearings on far-away peaks convinced me I was actually on the Gunas Ghatti, which would lead down the Pabar Nala Creek far to the west of where I wanted to be. The Rupin Ghatti was a drop in the ridgeline two kilometres east. My approach had been too far right. I reproached myself for taking what seemed, at the time, the easier route. I would have to sidetrack across the face and was glad now for the thigh-deep snow because the grade was so precipitous that on the uncovered scree of summer I could not have crossed it. Two hours of sidestepping brought me to the real Rupin Ghatti. I was exhausted.

A blue and white land shivered around me, a flux of titanium and turquoise. In the valley below two lammergeiers, bearded vultures, circled with no thought for what occurred above them. A wind whipped at me from the north. I hid behind a summit cairn of flat stones, gasping for breath, gulping until thin oxygen worked the tightness from my muscles. My head cleared, the cramps in my legs smoothed and I remembered – this was my passage out of the Indus and into the Ganges.

The Rupin Ghatti marks the boundary between two great watersheds. I was moving from the Western to the Central Himalayas, from a desert climate to temperate forest; from a xeriscape to the world of the monsoon, from the watershed of the Arabian Sea to that of the Bay of Bengal, and from Buddhism to Hinduism. I was on top of the world.

I looked in the direction of the far-off plains of India, a land of steamy heat and a billion people. North were the bare mountain deserts of Tibet, thinly populated, cold, wind-chopped lands. The Rupin Ghatti was the last major pass on my route, the last chance for snow and ice to impede my progress. With small steps and a clear mind I was confident I would reach the Mahakali River. I let out a great yell like a drunk teenager and on the wave of that holler dropped from the heavens.

The route fell and fell. My legs, beaten by the upwards slog, now had to contend with a thirty-degree downward pitch. Hard to believe that every year herds of sheep in the thousands crossed this barrier littered as it is with cliffs and icefalls, scree slopes and boulder fields. At the base of the first face I crossed a frozen pond, a circle of ice as flat as an ocean, its symmetry out of place in that tumultuous vertical world.

Following the pond’s outlet stream, the water barely trickling over shimmering stones, I came to a cascade. At its base the snow disappeared, replaced by a blanket of tawny grass. Edging along the lip I found a descendable chute and skied the scree using my backside as a brake. This was the source of the Rupin Nala River. I traced the spring, which grew dramatically in size, to the rim of another, even taller set of cascades and sat on a ledge above the fall. Below me billions of water particles mixed with the air, flying against gravity, beating against the cliff, relentlessly transforming the stone.

The sun was only an hour from setting and at that shallow evening angle it caught the levelled stream two hundred metres below me. The silver creek became a ribbon of gold that wound through a jade green meadow before disappearing into darkness. The little river was alive in that light.

As I moved over the brink I realized the cascade was a set of three pitches. The drop was dangerously abrupt and in sections I had to scramble down on all fours. The waterfall was in constant transformation; the bulk of the water dropped with the pull of gravity but sections were frozen in huge translucent stalactites and the air was saturated with cool, free-floating mists. Liquids, solids and gases fused in the sunset.

I reached the lower meadows, my legs shaking from the downhill pounding. Walking away from the cascades I turned to appreciate them one last time. What I saw took my breath away. Arcing across each of the three falls, one on top of the other, was a trio of rainbows, small half circles of vivid colour, steady against the water’s quicksilver background, and above the waterfall, the sky was stroked with red and amber, the colours of fire. Through the rainbows, icy ten-metre stalactites plunged, flushed with an internal glow.

With the sun’s setting I turned away in search of a campsite. Bitter cold descended from fierce stars.