To A Mountain In Tibet Part 2

'So young!'

But even here the novices were boys as young as ninesome seventy of themwhose adolescence waited like a time bomb. He goes on: 'But when I told my parents, my mother cried "No! No! Not a monk! You will just sit there, studying", and even my father said: "You may want to go now, but when you are twenty, twenty-five, you will regret it, you will want to leave and marry." I was the first son, you see, and the first son is meant to look after his parents. All the same, I went away.' In the hall beneath us, the monks' prayers have softened to purring. 'Now I cannot help them. I am here. They are far down the valley.' He pulls his crimson robes closer about his neck.

I ask bleakly: 'How do they live?'

'Their second son is twenty-five now, and he looks after them.'

'Do they want to return to Tibet?'

'They cannot.'

The people of this region, he says, can obtain a Chinese permit to cross the border for a week, usually to trade, and may with luck extend it for a pilgrimage to Kailas. But few of them did; and the monks were too afraid. 'It is you who can go to Kailas,' he says. He has never been. He says this without bitterness, yet the few Western trekkers pa.s.sing through have motives alien to any he knows. As for my own, I hesitate to speak them to him, inchoate as they are. They belong to a world grown dim to him, to Western self and attachment, not to the abstract compa.s.sion that he entertains. He speaks of Kailas with a dreamlike evangelism. He wants me to honour the journey that he cannot make himself.

'You know this is a mountain of great power. To travel there multiplies merit. The Buddha often flew there with his followers. And spiritual treasure-seekers meditated there thousands of themso its caves are full of blessing.' Sometimes I cannot decide whether he is a sage or a child. And often his words are drowned by the pounding drums beneath us. 'People walk around the mountain to cleanse their evil, the ten seats of sin. Yes, they may also come because they want things, perhaps success in some business, perhaps they have too many daughters and want a son...'

After a while, when the sound below subsides, he gets up and we descend to the prayer hall. The monks are dispersing in flocks of crimson and saffron, and the temple darkens.

He takes me round a dim confusion. The avenue of low pews, where the monks had sat among cushions and bells, leads to the painted skeleton of a great altar. It rises in tiers of bright artefacts: offerings in barley dough and wax, guttering b.u.t.ter-lamps and bowls of water, plastic flowers, monstrances, peac.o.c.k feathers, topped by photographs of prestigious lamas in ceremonial crowns and dark gla.s.ses. Above these again a huge gilded Buddha, draped unrecognisably in golden cloth, gazes from his halo with a smile of exalted absence. The abbot, patient and soft-voiced, guides me along the walls, identifying statues of other Buddhas and teachers, G.o.ddesses and multiple bodhisattvas, the blessed ones who postpone their own nirvana for the salvation of the world. In this proliferating pantheon, often elusive to me, the deities may reappear in different aspects or emanations of themselves. Their arms and faces divide and multiply in the dark. Often they turn feral and demonic. They hold up gems and lotuses, rosaries and thunderbolts, and stare into nothing. They are not only G.o.ds, but incarnate ideas. Their gestures are a cryptic language. Here divinity is protean and fluid. It manifests in b.e.s.t.i.a.l fury, female pity; it wears a smile of compa.s.sion and a garland of skulls. The abbot leads me falteringly on. But often I can discern no more than the gilded hand of a body obscured by votive scarves, or the plaster grimace of a demon. Most of the images are so coa.r.s.ely moulded that I cannot imagine any sanct.i.ty or meaning in them.

The doors close behind us, dimming the last light. I am uneasily aware of walking among a revered army whose evolution the Buddha would have condemned. The Buddhism that Tibet first received in the seventh centurymore than a thousand years after the death of its founderwas already rich in these alternately beautiful and grotesque offspring. Moreover the faith created its Tibetan bridgehead in the isolated kingdom of Shang-shung, near Mount Kailas, and in those bitter plateaux encountered a swarm of chthonic G.o.ds and spirits who violently coloured it. Then, over the coming centuries, the richly evolved Mahayana tradition of northern India infused the whole land, bringing with it a generous field of salvation and a host of variegated Buddhas, bodhisattvas and Hindu deities in disguise.

Of this inclusive pantheon the figures around me are descendants. Here is Chenresig, the Tibetan form of Avalokitesvara, whose incarnation is the Dalai Lama. He is the all-seeing lord of compa.s.sion, whose myriad arms burst like a peac.o.c.k's tail behind him, each hand pierced with an eye. The abbot points out the G.o.d's offspring, Drolma, the kindly G.o.ddess of pity and fertility, and several obscure incarnations of Padmasambhava, Tibet's patron saint.

In these, and the figures crowding round them, the austere origins of Buddhism are transformed. What was once a rigorous, agnostic philosophy, in which karma persisted through countless generations, has evolved into the promise of swift, esoteric systems of liberation, guiding saviours. It was in Tibet that tantric Buddhism reached its apogee, initiating its devotees into practices that enabled them to bypa.s.s the toilsome cycle of worldly reincarnations and enter nirvana in a lifetime's leap.

His monastery, the abbot says, belongs to the sect of Nyingma, the Ancient Ones, who claim their origins in Tibet's oldest Buddhism. They are followers, above all, of tantric ritual and contemplation, and at the end the abbot leads me, as if in challenge, to two statues in towering embrace. Here is the white-painted Buddha Vajrasattvashiny, crude, abstract. In his circling arms clings a sinuous consort, her legs hooked around his waist, their loins intermeshed. This is not s.e.x as humans know it, but a marriage of symbols. They suggest eternal o.r.g.a.s.m. Their nudity is glorified by bangles and tiaras. Her mouth is raised to his impersonal lips in an exalted offering of life.

The abbot says: 'This is the union of nothing and compa.s.sion.'

'Nothing?'

'The G.o.d is nothing. He realises nothingness.' The abbot is voicing the insistent wisdom of the Mahayana: the a.s.sertion that phenomena do not in themselves exist, that all is relative, illusion.

'And she?'

'She is compa.s.sion. She completes him.'

Such figures of carnal bliss generate many interpretations, and among advanced adepts their visualisation, even their enactment, may achieve a mystic dissolution on the path to Buddhahood. Sometimes compa.s.sion is attributed to the man, and wisdomflashing insightto the woman. Often she is conceived as his shakti, shakti, his embodied energy, entwining the G.o.d who created her. his embodied energy, entwining the G.o.d who created her.

There are married lamas, the abbot says, who follow this s.e.xual path, but not in his monastery. In the past, tantric extremes were often the way of solitary yogis, but in the monasteries the tantra coexists with philosophy and dialectics. However fractured since the golden fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these parallel traditions of logic and lived mysticism endure. On the banked shelves along the temple walls the abbot locates the cloth-enveloped scriptures of the Buddha's supposed sayings and their commentariesthe Kangyur and the Tengyurwhich in old Tibet inspired a vast and subtle literature of metaphysics. Here too are the tantric texts beloved of the abbot's order. He talks of them with easy affection, while I remain baffled. Who was the primordial Buddha Samantabhadra? What is the Secret Essence Tantra? How to understand the Clear Light of the Great Perfection? They rise from a sacred learning of which barely a fraction has been translated.

Only one element in these secret disciplines is half familiar to me. Forty years ago an old friend, the traveller Freya Stark, had given me a mandala of symmetrically disposed Buddhas on a golden field. She had bought this in Nepal, drawn to its strangeness. To me its cloud-enthroned Buddhas resembled autocratic babies mysteriously afloat; but once perhaps they had accompanied the meditation of a monk or hermit as his private window on salvation.

Cla.s.sically such mandalas portray a deity seated at the heart of a densely walled palace. The picture acts like a sac-red domain, impermeable to the illusory world outside. Adepts often use the mandala to focus on the deity with whom they strive to identify. Jung thought it a healing archetype of the unconscious. Other adepts use it more lightly as an aide-memoir. Still others systematically imagine their mandala to be centred on Mount Meru or Kailas, the spine of the world, and their own bodies aligned with the mountain too, drawing down power from above.

In the temple porch the abbot points out a muralled mandala whose archetype was designed in legend by the Buddha himself. 'This is the original, the Wheel of Becoming. You see it is turned by the G.o.d of death, Yama. And in the centre...people falling.'

I stare up. Around the axis of this great spoked disc, an arc of humans is climbing toward nirvana or catapulting down to h.e.l.l. At their core, isolated on the wheel's hub, I make out the tableau of a serpent, a c.o.c.kerel and a pig biting each other's tails.

'These are the poisons at the world's heart,' the abbot says. 'The snake-one is anger, the pig-one is ignorance, the c.o.c.k is desire. You see...'

I see that in the rest of the wheel all mortality is going about its business: conversing, acquiring, making love. Only the Buddha stands outside the circle, pointing to the moon in sign of liberation. But his nirvana, of course, cannot be depicted; even the h.e.l.l at the wheel's base looks schematic and unlikely; and the lives of those trapped on this earthly roundabout appear innocent, sometimes a little comic. If the artist was trying to suggest suffering, he seems to have lost heart. The animals that represent brutishness stand tranquil as if in paradise, and the G.o.dswho will come to grief in timeare enjoying themselves in the interim.

I ask the abbot what monk or layman painted this schema. (The role of the painter in Tibetan life is as disputed as most else.) 'Painting is a tradition among our monks,' he says. 'An old man who fled with the Dalai Lama taught it here, but went away to meditate in a cave near Kermi, and died there. He had already taught a disciple, but that monk left for Simikot'he smiles forgivingly'and went into business. But he in turn had taught two others...'

'And who painted the Wheel of Becoming?'

'I'm not sure.' The abbot's clear brows knit for a second, then he laughs. 'But I think it was the businessman.'

On the track beyond the monastery I come upon two memorial towers in rough stone. I peer through the narrow openings into their core, cluttered with pebbles and dust. Here relatives place a little rice or even a fleck of gold, or insert paper mantras to Drolma, the G.o.ddess of compa.s.sion. Deep inside I see the tiny cones moulded out of clay and a pounded fragment of bone from whoever is remembered here.

In these valleys, where bodies are burned or fed to vultures, the vanishment of the dead seems utter. Only the rare turret or stupa of some revered lama makes a gesture at remembrance. But when I ask a group of pa.s.sing monks about the towerswhen were they built, who do they commemorate?they do not know. And why would they care, who have been taught the transience of things?

As they walk on, I wonder at them, their lightness, their lack of need. They might already have pa.s.sed through a painless, premature death. They have shed what others shed in dying. They will leave nothing material behind them to be divided, claimed or loved. Their dispossession strikes me as at once freedom, and a poignant depletion. Their buoyant laughter follows me up the valley, but I do not quite envy them. I only wonder with a m.u.f.fled pang what it would be in the West to step outside the chain of bequeathal and inheritance, as they do, until human artefacts mean nothing at all.

My feet slow on the trail. But my memories come too hard for quiet thought. With the death of a last parent, material thingsold correspondence, a dilapidated house, a pair of slippersemerge like orphans to enshrine the dead. My mother threw away nothing. Her drawers spilt out letters, diaries, doc.u.ments, photos, fifty, seventy, eighty years old, with the stacked correspondence of my father, my dead sister, my nurse, even my nurse's mother. For months the papers lie piled, waiting. They grow huge with delayed sadness. How to decide what is to survive, what is to perish? The value of things no longer belongs to cost or beauty, but only to memory. The chipped and faded teacup is more precious than the silver tray that n.o.body used. And the letters bring confusion. Sometimes what was written for a day echoes in your head as if for ever. Every one discarded sounds a tiny knell of loss. The past drops away into the waste-paper basket and oblivion, and in this monstrous disburdening, grief returns you to a kind of childish dependence. You sift and preserve (for whom?) and cling to trivia. You have become the guardian of their past, even its recreator.

I had planned to burn my parents' love letters, then find I cannot. Instead I start to read, guiltily, fearfully, as if testing water. I have an idea that they should survive, placed in some archive, perhaps to flow at last unmoored into history. I tie them with new rubber bandsthe old ones have corroded over the envelopesand stack them away, I do not know for what. This, I suppose, is how once-private things endure: not by intention, but because their extinction is unbearable. So I dither between keeping and destroyingboth seem like betrayaland I store the letters, in all their devotion, their longing and sometimes loneliness, until another time.

In my father's wartime letters censorship precludes any word of military activity. He surrounds this void with casual incident, humour and remarks on flowers and birds. Even from the sh.e.l.l-racked beachhead of Anzio his letters tell my mother that April violets and wild crocus are growing there, with vetches, scarlet pimpernels and orchids. His caravan at divisional headquarters, he writes, is adorned with photographs of her, my sister and myself, among walls of cigarette tins stuffed with irises and cyclamen. There are birds too ('but of course not many owing to the continual explosions')yellowhammers and nightingales, which sing by day, and 'the prettiest is a wren-like little bird rather like a goldfinch', which reminds him of her. Only obliquely does he mention the sh.e.l.l craters around him, or the death of fellow officers, ormonths laterhow his caravan (and our photographs) was shredded by shrapnel.

Sometimes the darkened world and wasted years seem only a tunnel to the dream light of reunion. But their mutual danger went on haunting them. During the Blitz my mother had driven trucks in the London docks. Then my father begins to mention the Russian advance, and the Wehrmacht's decline. ('Our prisoners are poor fellows compared to those we captured in Tunis.') As the war nears its end, the scent of pines in the Italian hills starts to remind him of India, and on VE Day anemones and sorrel are whitening in the Austrian woods. He had not seen my mother for over two and a half years.

We are standing on a railway station in Hampshire, my hand in hers. My sister Carol is on her other side, I think. I am barely seven years old. At school I have announced that my father has killed all the Germans and is coming home to put up the Christmas decorations, in May. And now the steam train has pulled in, and returning servicemen are flooding down the platform. I scan their faces in paralysed suspense. I cannot remember what my father looks like. The men approaching us have alien moustaches and shining boots. Then a staff cane comes somersaulting out of a carriage window and my mother cries: 'That will be him! He's always joking.' The next moment he is striding towards us. My mother's hands loosen in ours. He is almost six foot five, huge for his day, unreachably handsome and covered in medals. And he is suffused with happiness. He is the father every schoolboy wants. I am at once scared and elated. When we arrive home my rediscovered parents do not reach the sitting room but fall embracing on the spare bed off the hall. Carol and I watch in stunned surprise, then enfold each other in copycat confusion.

I close the letters up, with the photo alb.u.ms that my father kept even before his marriage. In his earliest, Indian snapshots the young officers go unnamed. But who were the women, I wonder, left behind in sepia faintness, labelled 'Diana' or 'Marjorie'? Or the merry flapper who inscribed above her photograph in parting: 'Good luck, old thing'? He never spoke of them. He liked to imagine, my mother said, that there had been n.o.body before her.

But in my mother's first snapshots she is no more than a tiny girl; in my father's he is a twenty-year-old cadet; and for seven years of marriage the camera records a carefree childlessness. Around these early alb.u.msfor their leftover childsomething subtly shifts. The couple who inhabit them lived before I existed. They are young again, far younger than I am now, and a little mysterious. She kneels among her Dalmatian puppies or rides her horse in an army point-to-point. He is buffooning at the regimental party, dressed as a conjuror. They live in roles and contexts where I no longer miss them, and this separateness a.s.suages mourning. They inhabit their own lives, and I lose them a little. The tall lieutenant jokes with his comrades five years before he met my mother, fifteen before I was born. You recognise at last that their lives were not yours.

Yet strangely, in all but the youngest photos, the opposite is also true. Somehow, as if they possessed precognition or you were seeing them bifocally, they are already your parents, already senior, and inexplicably, although blithely young, are forever older than you.

All day a wind has been whipping up the Karnali valley, and intensifies at evening as we approach Yangar. From a distance the village might be built of card houses. They mount on one another's shoulders precipitously above the river, until they merge with living rock, flat-roofed and raised in horizontal courses of timber and stones, their flagpoles streaming prayers into the wind. Women are washing clothes where a brook splashes down, and turn their oval faces to us, smiling. We might already be in Tibet. We tramp the labyrinthine lanes under blank walls and beetling eaves. Serried beam-ends poke out like tiers of cannon. The houses loom in an interlocking maze of shifting levels and walkways. The alleys are twilit ravines. All around us long ladders climb and descend to aerial yards and terraces, and the voices of invisible people sound from the sky.

These dizzy perspectives multiply even after a family invites us in. The Dendu Lamas are farming people with short, Tibetan faces and ebony eyes. Yet they inhabit the air. In these eyries a woman may emerge to chat from the door of a terrace two yards away, but between you yawns a thirty-foot drop into the street. The heads of horses apparently stabled underground gaze into lanes at first-storey level. You ascend three tiers only to find yourself on somebody else's ground floor, and cowbells jangle from what you imagined to be an attic. n.o.body can afford to sleepwalk. Dhabu sits down by mistake on a rickety bal.u.s.trade, and is nearly pitched, laughing hysterically, into the alley below.

Dendu, our host, is forty and spry. He wears Western dress like all the village menanoraks and shabby trousers made in Chinaand a peaked cap blazoned 'Life Plus'. His big, loose mouth gives him a deceptive air of languor. We scale a series of laddersgiddy flights of notched tree trunksand stoop into rooms whose deep-framed windows leak in a dead, sunless light. Their floors, ceilings and pillars are all of heavy sal wood, where the dents of axe and chisel still show, but embedded now to a sombre, burnished strength. Dendu says his father built this ancient-seeming keep. Its pillars drive down two or three floors to the rock, and its beams are patterned with white circles native to Tibet. It was built for stocky mountaineers. Its furniture is thick and dwarfish. I bang my head on the door lintels. The low table looks like a bench, and the blundering Westerner sits down on it. Tolerantly Dendu motions to the floor, and in the faded light we sit in a genial circle round their stove, where his wife bakes bread. She is too shy at first to speak. Her jet-black hair parts into pigtails round high-coloured cheekbones. The shelves behind her are banked with gleaming tins and thermoses, a clock and a gutted radio, and hung with polished ladles. She hands out milk fresh from their cow. Beside her a bridal cupboard in Pompeian red is limned with faded flowers. She slaps the dough between her hands, on and on, then smoothes it on the hob to brown into thin bread, while Dendu pounds pickles in a wooden mortar.

Their village shares the dilemma of all this region, he says. Their land yields a single crop of barley each year, and it's not enough to feed them. So every spring and autumn he loads illicitly felled pine trees on to his three yaks and leads them north over the border into timber-starved Tibet. The town of Taklakot, he says, is the centre for this common contraband. Then he returns south carrying Chinese clothes for sale, with shoes, beer and flour.

I think of the poverty-stricken Thakuri villages far down the valleyof Lauri and his ragged childrenand wonder where Dendu's children are. At first I imagine he has none. His wife, in their arranged marriage, is six years older than him. But Dendu is a fixer. His clever daughters have entered the rumbustious boarding school downriver, then gone on to a charity school in Dharamsala, home in exile of the Dalai Lama. And his cherished son has won a.s.sistance to a college in Kathmandu, from which he will return to them. These despised Bhotia, it seems, are turning their isolation to account in trade'China is nearer to us than Kathmandu,' Dendu sayswhile exploiting their Tibetan heritage. 'Things are all right for us.' He offers us tea mixed with salt and yak b.u.t.ter. 'Things are good.'

But what happens, I wonder, to families denied a son?

Dendu says: 'Then their daughter must bring her husband from his village to live with them. It may be far awayn.o.body marries within the village. But n.o.body marries outside their caste either. Unless it is for love.'

Love. It is not much spoken of. A bride must leave her childhood home without this tenderness. Years ago I had come upon the corpse of a young woman floating in the Cauvery river in India. The police had shrugged her away. It was only a woman, they said. She had probably been broken by her husband's home.

Tentatively I ask Dendu's wife about this ordeal. What had she felt?

Dendu answers for her at once, but kindly: 'That is our way in this country.'

But I ask her again, tactlessly. She shrinks behind the stove and her face disappears into her hands. At last she whispers: 'The first three years were very hard. My village is far away. I thought about my parents all the time.' Then a high, smothered tinkling sounds through her splayed fingers. I am afraid that she is crying, but it is laughter. She looks up. 'Then my love for my husband came, and there were children.' She smiles, as if with remembered relief. He is smiling too, suddenly embarra.s.sed. She starts slapping the dough between her palms again, while he pokes sticks into the stove.

Sometimes silence falls: not the awkward Western hiatus, but a comfortable interval festive with burps and chomping, among people to whom eating is not taken for granted. Immured in the dark comfort of their home, in this scarred magnificence of wood, I momentarily forget Dendu's tree-felling, and lapse into drowsy well-being. Their welcome is warm and modest. She shows little jewellery, but wears the striped ap.r.o.n and long skirts of Tibet. Their larder is stored with rice and gas canisters. They share the same wide, calm face.

Their faith is far removed from the monastery downriver. Two templesmale and femalehang in the crags above the village, but Dendu does not know why they were gendered. 'That's just what we call them.' A few times a year the villagers a.s.semble to pray in one or other. They speak to no G.o.d or Buddha in particular, he says. They just pray for their good fortune. And on a plateau further upriver, their bodies after death are cut in pieces. 'We used to tip bodies into the river,' he says, 'but not now. Now it is cleaner. The birds come.'

From their rooftop in the starlight the temples appear only as high, empty s.p.a.ces pale with prayer flags. After Dendu retires for the night in their storeroom, and Dhabu to his horse, Iswor, Ram and I lie in our chrysalid sleeping bags along the floor, lit by a naked bulb. Outside is silence. But Ram has nightmares beside me, his teeth grinding, his scooped-out cheeks turned to mahogany, so that I wonder whether to wake him, but do not, and he moans at last into quiet.

CHAPTER FIVE.

From far up our path, Yangar remains in sight, and stirring with the dawn. Momentarily we stop and look back on the illusion of a golden valley. For a mile the cliff walls ease apart on its enclosed peace, and the first sunlight is trickling through the fields. A tributary stream glitters down across our way, and birds are shifting in the wild apricot trees.

Then we turn and move on high above the river. Far ahead, beyond its long, constricted pa.s.sage, the white palisade of mountains bars our skyline, and a few clouds rise like smoke signals from its peaks. But the fluting of the optatus optatus (or (or saturatus saturatus) cuckoo still echoes down the valley, and a handsome fox saunters blithely across our path. It is hard to remember that the fields of Yangar, spread like magic in the young light, are too poor to support their farmers' lives. Somewhere far off, faint in the stillness, sounds the ring of an axe.

The valley is closing in. Below us outsize trees still crowd along the riversometimes the spruces rise 150 feet from its banksbut we are tramping high up through thinning scrub and rock. Cistus and cream-coloured potentilla flower everywhere; flights of yellow-breasted wagtails are about, and a startling trogon precedes us from branch to branch in flashes of crimson and black. But now we are crossing the ever-wider track of avalanches, whose torn-up rocks have stilled to minefields of razor scree. The few trees are dwindling from our trail. Often the pines stand erect, but blackened and long dead, as if burnt from within, and sometimes the cliffs of the river bank opposite descend near vertically for 500 feet.

Then our trail drops to the river. Steel cables carry us over a thin plank bridge, and we mount the far side at last to the scattered houses of Muchu. High on its hill a tiny old man in spectacles is trying to rotate the bald prayer drum in the temple porch, while a frail-looking monk struggles up the slope to unlock its doors. I do not know what to expect. Compared to the monastery complex near Yalbang, the temple is small and solitary. What could have survived in this wilderness, overrun for years by atheist partisans?

The doors open on dereliction. In the pallor falling from a narrow skylight, we are walking not into ransacked disorder but a scene of helpless decay. The temple must have fallen desolate piecemeal, over years of neglect. Framed by rough pillars and low, makeshift tables, its altar is a rotting shelf where a line of b.u.t.ter lamps burnt out long ago. In the wall behind, the niches gape empty or glower with blackened figurines that I cannot decipher. A cascade of soiled ceremonial scarves dangles from the foremost statues, whose stucco faces of pink and gold grin out in ruin. In other niches the holy scriptures are piled in confusion, and Padmasambhava sits surrounded by his wives, all drunkenly aslant. Everywhere the paint is peeling or gone, and at the centre, in a crimson alcove aswirl with faded dragons, Chenresig, the Tibetan G.o.d of mercy, towers over a photograph of the scandalous tulku tulku reincarnation whose story I had heard at Yalbang, and who died in this village. reincarnation whose story I had heard at Yalbang, and who died in this village.

The monk has padded after us, with the old man whirling his own prayer wheel. The statue of Chenresig, he murmurs, was discovered miraculously in a nearby river; the others the villagers made with their own hands. I can discern no difference. Chenresig's golden head bulges with blank eyes. His raised hand dribbles strings of amulets and old coins. Other statues are crammed together in pious anarchy, waving tridents or cradling bowls. What power they might once have owned has blurred to a shared corrosion, as if they were starting to revert to the chalk from which they came.

I ask the monk how old this temple is, but he does not know. There are eighteen monks in the village, he says, and they take turns tending the temple. 'When the Maoists came, we formed a committee of villagers, and they left us alone.'

'The police ran away.' The old man fixes me with cloudless eyes. 'But we banded together'he motions at the altar'and saved everything.'

I am not seeing the shrine as they are, I know. For them this derelict barn is a place of redemption, cleansed by its crossfire of gazing Buddhas. Only Iswor mutters: 'How poor...how poor...'

On the walls, the damp stucco is bellying out and the murals falling in wholesale chunks. The Buddhas of the Past, Present and Future levitate across the dark in green haloes and thickets of painted roses, but are peeling away. Even Yama, the lord of death, is dimming in the plaster to the transience he himself ordains, together with the demon counterparts of kindlier G.o.ds.

These so-called wrathful deities infiltrate the Tibetan pantheon with terror. The old man's prayer wheel spins faster when he pa.s.ses one. For some reason here they look more threatening in decay than when complete. They haunt every temple like a bitter shadow world. Some are mundane spirits with specialist powers, demanding tribute; others have been coopted as guardians of the Buddhist law. But most prominent are the alter egos of benign bodhisattvas, who don awesome forms to fight ignorance and evil. It is as if these saints had exploded out of tranquil repression into insensate fury. They throw away their lotuses and begging bowls and s.n.a.t.c.h up cleavers and flaying knives. Their eyes swell from peaceful slivers to jutting orbs, and their once-folded legs break free into stomping columns that squash Hindu G.o.ds underfoot. Sometimes they put on living serpents and tiger skins, and their brows sprout tiaras of skulls. Their jewellery is human bones. One and all, their mouths gape open on flame-like tongues and rows of feral teeth that end in wicked little tusks. Some are still attached to their consorts, who have turned vicious and uns.e.xed.

The interpretation of these monsters is conflicted. Cla.s.sically they are said to echo abstract forces as surely as their serene counterparts, and liberate those who realise their truth. Even Yamawho rampages bull-faced and pitch black in a halo of fire and demonsis only an emanation of the merciful bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. But other scholars believe these inverted G.o.ds are psychic reactions to a harsh landscape and brutal cold; while yet others claim that they are the shamanic leftovers of an older Tibet, still vengeful and una.s.similated.

The number and power of such divinities is echoed in the demon-ridden life of everyday Tibet. But the origins of the most formidable are not found there at all, but in the warm plains and tantric texts of India. The Hindu G.o.d Shiva himself, who meditates eternally on the summit of Mount Kailas, finds his savage mirror image in his own consort, Kali.

In the dark valley of Dakshinkali, south of Kathmandu, the Hindu G.o.ddess has her sanctuary where two rivers meet. Every Sat.u.r.day, pilgrims in their hundreds circle down the wooded gorge to feed her. Women mostly, brilliant in their best saris, carry split coconuts, marigolds, and c.o.c.kerels with trussed legs. Often they lead unwary goats, and even buffaloes. The sounds of celebration rise from the valley: chattering cries and laughter, broken chanting, the clash of bells. Holy men inscribe the pilgrims' foreheads with tika tikas of rice and vermilion; cooking fires flicker on the terraces. As I descend, the pilgrims slow to a clamorous queue, and I glimpse on the valley floor an open temple dripping with maroon hangings and overarched by four gilded serpents.

At first I imagine that the crimson coating on the bas-relief of Kali is moving drapery. Then I see the carving is awash with blood. In this inner courtyard, where the worshippers cram shoulder to shoulder, the casual priests, their robes. .h.i.tched to the thigh, receive their platters of hibiscus and marigold, while two butchers collar the living beasts. Beneath the bloodied G.o.ddess, the goats collapse at the slash of a knife, and the c.o.c.kerels' heads are flipped off like bottle tops. The sculptured face shows only slit eyes and the mouth of a spoilt girl. A severed buffalo head sits like a gory anvil at her feet, its carca.s.s foundered to the ground a yard away. A guardian yells at me to remove my shoes. The marble floors are a sea of blood and offal. The lissom women walk here barefoot, like priestesses. Bells crash and tinkle as they circle the shrine. Grey mongrels sleep underfoot, oblivious on the crimsoned tiles.

Kali's statue is one of those primitive images the more potent for their inhuman muteness. Cla.s.sically she is portrayed hideous, a trampler of demons and a drunkard on blood. At Dakshinkali she accepts for sacrifice only uncastrated males. Shiva alone can control her. In yogic practice he represents pure, inert consciousness, she the energy by which he creates. In other guises she becomes a figure of cosmic triumph, the bringer of change who at last devours time itself and lapses back into primal dark. Sometimes she is even described as beautiful.

I climb back up the valley, where families are feasting on their sacrifices under the trees. Everyone is in high spirits except me, hypocritically repelled by what Western abattoirs conceal. Along the path the stalls are selling trinkets and fluffy toys: little teddy bear pendants and animal heads with Disney smiles.

That evening, in my monastery guest house in Kathmandu, I peeled off my blood-soaked socks and sat in the garden where the marigolds and hibiscus bloomed unpicked. Tashi, a monk who had befriended me, sat opposite and listened to Kali's slaughter with disgust. He came from a poor village in Bhutan. The Buddhist ban on taking life had long ago sickened him of bloodshed, and the wrathful deities in his own Buddhist pantheon had calmed into saviours.

'There's a Hindu G.o.ddess has her festival here in September,' he said. 'Kali or Durga, I don't know. The streets stream with blood for three days. In past years the king started the festival by slaughtering something. And we monks hate this. People sacrifice in the hope of better business deals or male children. How can they promote themselves through the suffering of poor animals? We always close ourselves away for those days, and light lamps for the souls of the animals and pray.'

In Tashi's monastery, a month before, I had watched a monk reaching out to the folding gate of a storeroom. Gently from its interstices, which would crush together when the door closed, he extracted a small marbled b.u.t.terfly, and carried it away to a flower.

Tashi had a soft, peasant face and crescent mouth. He was only thirty but would soon begin the three-year period of solitary meditation that he craved. 'This animal slaughter will stop in the end,' he said. 'Young people will change it. They are turning against the practices of their elders. Everything is changing...'

I forgot that he himself was young. Under his loose magenta robes his arms showed smooth, hairless, but his face was blotched and scarred by his rural childhood, and seemed settled now into a st.u.r.dy peace. 'How they will replace those practices I don't know. We live in an age of decline. I think before the Chinese invaded Tibet, and our Buddhist people were dispersed, that our faith was much purer. Now we're exposed to Western ways, and of course to women. In our faith a senior monkone who's achieved a certain level of realisationmay sometimes marry. So she becomes an inspiration to him, and he a guru to her. But this is rare, and late. And now I hear of young monks going after girls, and some Western women complain that monks grab at them. The monks see women on television, of course...'

I asked with vague surprise: 'They watch much television?'

'Oh yes, a lot. The monks get very excited.' He was starting to laugh. 'Only last night all the monks got furious furious.'

'Why was that?' But I knew their calm could be deceptive. In Tibet they remained the spearhead of political protest, and centuries ago the monasteries had run amok in internecine war.

'It was Manchester United. All the monks love football. They got very angry last night about the European Cup. Manchester United were beaten by Barcelona, and all the monks love Manchester United. You should see them from behind, watching television, how they argue. They thought the referee was biased...they were enraged how he gave out penalty tickets. They started shouting things.'

I shook my head. 'I thought the monks prayed in the evening.'

'Well, perhaps it's a kind of meditation. They concentrate on the ball and the rest of the world goes away...'