These two days past we had left
the smell of mint behind us,
and thyme and bhojpatra trees
and Bhotiya children pouched
on the backs of their mothers,
luminous among black capes.

We had transcended already
the world of pollen and drifting spore,
the green congeries of moss and lichen
and the dark gods of fertility.
We were trekking past saw-toothed crags
touched with mineral oxides
and so wind-scarred that we called them
the rock-temples of Rimkhim.
The evening was beryl-blue
as we left the grass-bowl of Barahoti
and reached the wind shadow.
In a place which has no grass, no trees,
no dust, you cannot see the wind.

At 16,000 feet, near Bamjar,
we pitched our alpine tents.
Loose shale lay over the plain,
glinting in the last rays of the sun,
and bones so gray and leaden that diamonds
in their vicinity would have been dulled.
'Goats were slaughtered here, but why
in such numbers?' 1 asked my Bhotiya friend.
And Ran Singh answered, avoiding my eye,
'Some hundred Tibetans, a decade back,
were caught in a snowdrift and that was that.'
Suddenly the night grew teeth
and the wind became a switchblade.

Tibet was across,
the same sky covered us both.
The constellations over the Lamas
were the same as over us.
Once they may have rained peace
and the benediction of the Buddha,
but now they were cloven-footed,
boar-snouted and lion-maned,
aggressive drives of the gods
that went warring through the night.

Dreams came ghost-lit
and shortly guttered
like the butter-lamps of Tibet.
At four in the morning, when the constellations
still moved around us like the last
revolutions of a giant prayer-wheel,
we set off plodding,
eyes fixed on the next six feet.

It was a race against the wind gods;
we had to reach the pass
before the winds got there.
We crunched our way across the frosted earth
over the rock-and-bone tundra,
then up a defile on to a stretch
of gently rising rock.
We had transcended even moisture now,
the thin spread of frost was not there,
nor ice-ruts splintering under the feet like glass.

The deities here were rock and height,
not forgetting wind, for we were near the pass.
The winds came down like the shrill chant of women.
The winds howled like a hundred tantric gods.
Ran Singh came out with a Bhotiya proverb:
'They are tough alike, crossing a pass
or bearing a child!'

I have no curse nor mantra
to keep the demons from me.
I have no foolproof earplug
to keep wind-voices from me.
I am, nearing the escarpment
where wrapped in fog she towers,
O mother-goddess Dolma,
symbol of the perfect flower,
brooding over my future
rock-ledges stand, like druids,
my blood congeals to frost-dust,
my bones are churned to fluid.
Breathe vowels through my spine-flue
to keep me poised and balanced,
to keep me moving towards
the axis of my being.

Goddess I am seeking shelter
from the approaching storm.
I seek the cavern-aspect
of your embracing form
which smothers in lap-darkness
yet lights the spinal reed.
From your womb all proceeded,
into you all recede.

The upper reaches of the pass were straight,
a vertical thrust that obscured the sun
and half the sky. Treading over grit
we felt the air-drifts quiver
as we touched the top ozone and ether,
and a shell burst of light greeted us
as fifty Indian peaks erupted
with snow and the spray-hangover
of ice falls and the blue of distance,
as if some god had with a palette-knife
honed the landscape with ethereal colours.

I recalled the Buddha's words and deflected them
'Opened wide are the gates of immortality,
ye that have eyes to see release your faith.'

But irony haunted me even at this height;
Kailash was veiled by a cloud layer of white.