Books |
To a Mountain in Tibet
Colin Thubron
By
Published: Jul 11, 2011
Category:
Travel
Something in me is desperate to travel to Tibet, climb to 18,000 feet and make the death-defying pilgrimage around Kailas. It’s a sweet fantasy. But it’s not my destiny.
“To A Mountain in Tibet” is about the Kailas pilgrimage. The author is Colin Thubron, a British travel writer and novelist. As it happens, he’s a student of solitude, which, he knows, will intensify in Tibet. And he’s totally aware that, with his parents and sister dead, he’ll be facing personal winds much sharper than the winds on Kailas. In short, he’s just the writer to turn a short — 218 pages — travel book into a small masterpiece. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
This is a travel book only in the sense that the writer takes a trip, meets people along the way, records those conversations and offers commentary. In every other way, it’s about the most important trip any of us will ever take — the trip to the self. That’s not a pumped-up conceit here. We are talking, remember, about Mount Kailas.
These descriptions will suggest the holiness: “A site of astral beauty, separated from its companion Himalayas as if by divine intent.” The most sacred of the world’s mountains, holy to one fifth of the world’s people. The highest freshwater lake in the world —“Buddha’s mother bathed here before taking him into her womb.
Colin’s mother has died, and as he walks, he remembers. She was a hoarder; she threw away nothing. After her death, he had to winnow:
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 nobody used. And the letters bring confusion. Sometimes what was written for a day echoes in your head as if forever. Every one discarded sounds a tiny knell of loss.
As I was saying: not your average travel guide.
But there is plenty of travel, observation, anecdote. The monks love soccer. Colin’s feet bleed. Air so clear you can see a person ten miles away. “To Hindus, ‘departure for Kailas’ is a metaphor for death.” At 11,000 feet, he faces oxygen deprivation: “The air is receding from me, everything depleted. My breath is rasping sobs.” Which takes him back to his dying mother, and how he hooked the oxygen mask over her face in the hospital: “When I remove the mask, my mother’s hands go on clutching it. It is as if I were taking away her life.”
Inside, the intensity builds: “I want to touch hands that I know have grown cold.” At 18,000 feet, someone says one word —I won’t spoil it — and Colin’s whole being rushes back to the death of his sister. A dazzling revelation, and in a very few words.
Outside your skin, you are always walking — and in this empty landscape, feeling as if you’re getting nowhere. And then you are. That is, you circle Mount Kailas, you complete the pilgrimage.
Climb the mountain? The peak is at 22,000 feet. But the difficulty isn’t just technical, isn’t just physical. No one has ever reached its summit.
