The Kashmir Shawl. Rosie Thomas
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barren. The mountains loomed over them again, shadowed in sepia and purple, the most commanding ridge sometimes crowned with the massive white walls of a gompa.
At Lamayuru, a few miles before the Fotu Pass, which was the highest point they would have to cross on the route, they stopped for the night in the shadow of the biggest monastery. It was a lowering, piled-up mass of white walls and red-painted wooden slabs, small-windowed, topped off with the squat domes of a dozen chortens with black and gold twisted spires that glittered like spun sugar. The ponies toiled up hundreds of irregular steps to reach the cluster of buildings clinging to the skirts of the monastery. Prayer flags danced against the blue sky overhead and Nerys was reminded of Spitok gompa, past which they had climbed on the road out of Leh. With a prickle of guilt, she realised she had been so busy with the small adventures of the road, and laughing about them with Myrtle and Archie, that Evan had hardly been in her mind. At this distance he seemed a dark, disapproving figure, in contrast to the light-filled days she had been enjoying.
At Lamayuru they were staying in the inevitable rest house, but this one was much bigger than the roadside versions because of the stream of visitors to the monastery. Nerys was shown to a room of her own, no more than a tiny stone slot with a single narrow window. It looked out over a huge drop, with black choughs gliding below the sill.
Their dinner that night was unusually subdued, as if the proximity of the monastery and the columns of red-robed monks quietened even Myrtle.
Afterwards, instead of going back to her cell Nerys went outside and, on an impulse, climbed more steps to the walls of the monastery itself. She tipped back her head to look at the great edifice towering above her, black against the curtain of stars. Patches of faint yellow light glowed like veiled eyes in a few of the windows and she shivered in the wind. She thought she could hear the rise and fall of voices, chanting a prayer. Archie had murmured over dinner that Lamayuru village was a bleak place to live because the tributes and food demanded by the lama to sustain the monks left too little for the villagers themselves. It certainly seemed a desolate place tonight, as she pressed deeper into the angle made by a stone wall to find a scrap of shelter. From somewhere among the tiers of ramshackle houses beneath her rose the sound of a dog howling. She tried to imagine what Evan could achieve in a place like this, offering the promises and threats of a different religion to people who would be better off providing for their families and keeping their rice and mutton for themselves.
All she felt towards her husband was an exasperated tenderness, and she wondered whether this diminished affection, against her own belief that what he did was futile, would be anything like enough to carry her through the years ahead. I could do it, she thought, and anything else he wanted of me, if we had our own children.
She was thoroughly cold now. The monastery loomed so high and dark it was as if it was going to topple over and crush her. She pulled her coat closer around her shoulders and made her way back down the steps. Archie’s bearer was waiting at the door of the dingy rest house.
‘Come now, ma’am,’ he called, and she felt guilty that she had kept him in the draught when he could have been reclining on his blanket with a pipe.
‘I’m sorry, Hari.’
He lifted the oil lamp and led the way up the wooden stairs, past curtained doorways to her cubicle. He lit the candle that had been left for her on a little shelf and stood back. ‘I bring cocoa, ma’am. Coming now.’
‘I won’t have cocoa tonight, Hari, thank you. I’ll go straight to bed.’ She wanted to close her eyes, and for daylight to come quickly. Lamayuru was an oppressive place.
After she had blown out the candle she lay listening to the darkness. There was a series of scraping sounds, probably made by rats in the ceiling. Wind gusted through the cracks between the wall and the tiny window frame. Then she heard another noise. It was no more than a woman’s voice giving a low cry, something between a moan and a sigh, followed by a series of rising gasps. And then, as a postscript, a conjoined bubble of laughter followed by a whispered ssssh.
Nerys twisted under her blankets and pulled the crackling pillow hard over her ears. She didn’t want to have to listen to Myrtle and Archie making love; there seemed too many things tonight that she didn’t want to hear or know or think about. Her own life seemed small, solitary and devoid of purpose.
The next day their route led onwards, over the high pass and through the town of Kargil. With Lamayuru a long way behind them, the travellers were in high spirits. More long but ultimately satisfying days passed, until only the jagged walls of the Greater Himalaya lay between them and the Vale of Kashmir. With the mountains in the distance it seemed impossible that their caravan could find a way to the summit via the Zoji Pass, but as they came closer they were able to pick out the crooked filament of a track zigzagging upwards. In one place there was a dart of brilliance as a mirror ornament or a fragment of polished metal on an ascending pony flashed the rays of the rising sun. Myrtle was reassuring when Nerys reined in her mount to assess the extent of the climb.
‘It looks harder than it actually is. Remember, you’ve already climbed higher than eleven thousand over the Fotu La, and on your way up to Leh last year.’
‘I’m not worried. I know we’ll do it. I’m just wondering what the view will be like from the top.’
Myrtle’s eyes shone between the folds of her veil. ‘Like nothing you could imagine. It will be like looking down into Paradise.’
This thought sustained Nerys through the long, baking ascent. Dust clogged her nose and throat and her water-bottle was soon empty. The sun rose higher, beating down on her head and shoulders. While she rode, her pony walked more and more slowly and she felt its shudders when the pony boy whipped its quarters. When she slid to the ground the stones dug up through the soles of her boots and the sun blazed fiercely. The jingle of the ponies’ harness set up a rhythm that was only broken by the occasional whistling of marmots from their burrows among the rocks. Black lammergeiers cruised the empty air spaces, lazily turning on their fretted wings.
The pass itself was obscured by intermediate outcrops, and Nerys thought grimly that they would be climbing for ever. Archie was far ahead but Myrtle matched her pace to Nerys’s. They exchanged occasional words of encouragement, but most of their energy was taken up with just placing one foot in front of the other.
As they mounted higher, Nerys began counting the number of bends still to be negotiated. There were seven, then five, then only one more.
‘Is this it?’ she begged Myrtle, dreading a false summit and a concealed cliff still to be negotiated.
Whenever she glanced backwards the wide brown desert of Ladakh had receded further, and she knew that they were crossing into a different country.
‘Nearly,’ Myrtle puffed. ‘Why must Archie dash ahead all the time?’
They came out on to a broad stretch of ground with chortens outlined ahead against the sky. Archie and the forward party were waiting for them. Down the slope Nerys glimpsed the picked-over bones and hide of a dead pony that must have fallen from the line of a caravan. It was a still day, but the air surged around her and she retied the strings of her straw hat.
They crossed the saddle of the pass, thankful for the almost horizontal ground, until they drew level with the chortens. The rough stone mounds were strung with hundreds of flags, faded or still bright, with ragged white streamers festooned between them.
Myrtle and Archie stood with their hands linked, silently looking west. Nerys came up beside them, and stopped short. Spread beneath her feet, unrolled like the most magical of carpets, was the Vale of Kashmir.
The folds of land swept up towards them, lower ridges cloaked with ranks of sombre fir trees and the higher ones bright with silver birches. Long seams of snow lay in the shaded gullies, and waterfalls laced silver threads down purple rock faces. A haze of warmth blurred the great hollow of the Vale, but she could see distant pasture lands, ripe fields, and the curves of a river. After the bare grey and brown landscape she had just crossed, the soft blend of a thousand shades of blue and silver and lavender mingled with pale green and gold seemed too sumptuous to be real. She stared