Charles Allen

To the holiest in the height

Charles Allen is impressed by an arduous journey that is both a pilgrimage and a way of mourning lost relatives

Colin Thubron’s new book will disappoint those of his readers who admire him for his reserve. He is the last and perhaps the best of the gentleman travellers of the old school, his books distinguished by scholarship, rigour and that extraordinary ability that he has made his own: the capacity to immerse himself in someone else’s culture and yet remain utterly detached. Those same readers may also be disappointed by the slimness of the present volume, which occupies days rather than months and encompasses a mere province rather than the usual continent. But they would be wrong to dismiss To a Mountain in Tibet as lightweight. Nothing Thubron writes cannot but be taken seriously, and this same book may come to be seen not only as the most revealing he has ever published but also the most profound.

To a Mountain in Tibet is a first-person account of a short trek over the Central Himalayan chain from Nepal to the Chang Tang plateau of far western Tibet, followed by a circumambulation of the sacred peak of Mount Kailas. The Kailas kora is now a feature of every Himalayan trekking company’s brochure and to Thubron’s evident irritation the cat that specialises in walking by himself is forced by the Chinese authorities to travel as part of an organised tour. He sulks Achilles-like as far as he can and, as soon as the Tibet border formalities are done with, reverts to his accustomed status of solitary traveller; solitary, that is, but for the necessary company of a local guide and cook (not Sherpas but less sophisticated Tamangs, for centuries oppressed by their more powerful Hindu neighbours but now, in Thubron’s words, ‘touched by an urban gloss’), and the occasional ponyman.

At the southern foot of Mount Kailas he joins a crowd of Tibetan pilgrims to witness the shamanistic ritual of the raising of the great flag-draped earth-sky pole that takes place annually at the full moon of the fourth month, tut-tutting at the heavy-handed policing of the event by the authorities (who, if Thubron’s observations are accurate, grow increasingly oppressive with each passing year).

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