The snow leopard.
The sign on the fence said as much. “Snow Leopard” in capital letters. Then a few lines of text, a map perhaps. It’s been some years since then. But what I do remember is the colour photo that had been printed at the bottom. That took my attention.
It depicted a powerful cat staring intently into the camera’s objective. The animal had four muscular legs, grey fur with dark, ring-shaped spots and a long, thick tail. One of its paws was raised mid-stride. Of all, what captivated me was the beast’s gaze. Its pale blue eyes were wide open and conveyed a strong sense of purpose, of will. Of intelligence.
Hooked, I peered into the large enclosure, half-expecting to see the snow leopard just right ahead, posing for my little disposable Kodak. But all there was were junipers, aspen and larch trees. Cold rain dripped between the branches.
I looked harder; all my schoolmates had moved on, jogging towards the monkeys’ habitat further ahead, but I stayed put. For the first time in my eight years of existence, I found I wanted something really bad. Eventually, the park ranger who was accompanying us recognised that they’d left one behind and came back to fetch me.
“Where’s the snow leopard?”, I remember asking. I think I can remember him smiling, but I do remember his words. “He’s out there, somewhere. But the snow leopard does what he wants”.
There’s a place called ལ་དྭགས. Translated from Tibetan, la-dags means “land of mountain passes”. A tiny corrugation in that portion of the planet’s crust that has been crumpled by the collision between the Indian subcontinent and Eurasia, Ladakh – as it’s usually written – is a place of desert, deep cold, thin air and eternal snows. A land where Buddhist prayer flags flutter in the wind, and where snow leopards prowl on the hunt for prey. Almost 30 years after that rainy school trip to a safari park near Milan, I went there.
There’s a time to see a snow leopard, but the one I chose wasn’t it. Winter snows force this extremely elusive animal to lower grounds, reducing its roaming habitat to a chunk where binoculars and spotters have a realistic chance of seeing one from the other side of a valley. Though snows still blanketed most of the Stok Kangri range, its level had risen high enough to increase the area to cover by a factor of ten.
“You need to come in winter”, said a man sympathetically, unperturbed by the fact that this stranger had stopped him as he dropped off his daughter at school. His jeep had a ‘Snow Leopard Fund’ sticker on the back door. “But”, he offered after a moment of pause “There’s a snow leopard pelt in Hemis monastery”.
There had been a time, back in the 1990s, when Buddhism was the epitome of cool. Richard Gere was Buddhist and so was Roby Baggio, the footballer. Other VIPs were. Every self-respecting Alpine refuge had to have its prayer flags, and head-shaven monks had to feature in every Everest documentary.
Still, it all felt rather confusing. Nirvana, Samsara, Karma: they all had a roundabout way about them compared to the straightforward, one-and-done, linearity of a monotheistic religion. Or so it seemed to me. Buddhism, in the time when I was growing up, was either paternalized as a fad or tossed in the commiseration bin for what the poor Tibetan were enduring under the Chinese yoke. Now, I reasoned, I had the chance to know more.
The day after my chance encounter with the snow leopard, my rucksack and I joined about seventy Nepali bricklayers on a bus leaving Leh city for Karu, 40 kilometres up the Indus valley. Outside, Ladakh ran past the windows, hidden behind a scarf or a dusty jacket. The land was still not quite out the throes of winter, divided between small parcels of fertile soil and the endless desert. As the bus drove on, I was transported back in time to a place not far from here, to another valley, the one dug by the river Panj between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. There was, though, a key difference.
Buddhism was everywhere, here. Prayer flags danced around a statue erected on a rocky pinnacle; wheels, ranging from miniature to fridge-sized, spun their mantras. Chortens dotted the land and, finally, monasteries clung to prominent hilltops like Medieval fortresses.
Ladakh had been inhabited by Tibetan peoples since well before Christ, and Buddhism arrived not that far later. The map I scribbled on my notebook was punctuated with gompas, or monasteries. Here, thousands dedicated their life to a faith I barely knew anything about, practiced rituals I ignored, held worldviews I’d never heard. Ahead of me was the perspective of exploring a new human landscape and, after a brief faux-pas that involved me gate-crashing an Indian Army base, I was on my way.
Other tourists glided by in white passenger vans, or rode puttering Royal Enfield motorcycles. No one but me walked. I opted for the slow way around; pedibus calcantibus, as the man said, I wanted to trek my way to as many monasteries as my legs could take me. I ignored if the concept was practiced at these latitudes, but the concept of a pilgrimage felt oddly appropriated and Hemis gompa, dead ahead on the other bank of the Indus, was to be my first stop.
Ladakhi monasteries come in all shapes and sizes; yet, regardless of history, dimensions and wealth, some features remain the same no matter what. Every monastery, for starters, will feature a dukhang, or prayer hall, for the resident monks to congregate in. By virtue of its wealth, Hemis had two and, attracted by the noise, it was to the one on the left that I tip-toed into, barefoot and terribly afraid of crashing into some timeless object of art.
A world painted red and gold opened up once I pulled the curtain hanging above the portal. The hall was a forest of wooden columns painted deep crimson, with garlands hnging from the ceiling. In the faint light that trickled down from distant skylights, I could all but guess the benign gaze of a copper Buddha and, around it, the outlines of dozens of monks.
The air inside the dukhang smelt of dust, ancient wood and incense. There also was a sweet, mossy scent which, as I was to learn after, was typical of butter lamps. But, above all, the air was full of sound.
A happy cacophony of voices filled the dukhang. The monks sat in a hemicycle of futon mattresses ad low tables lining the walls of the room; some read aloud from books made of long strips of paper, while their neighbours were engrossed in lively debates. In the back pews, young novices bundled in red blankets laughed and taunted one another. A monk in his mid-twenties wore a burgundy beanie hat emblazoned with the New York Yankees logo.
The dukhang existed in a parallel universe where time had ceased to matter. Fluorescent lightbulbs and a battery-operated spinning lotus flower suggested that electricity had been invented, but the scene that I, standing in a corner, was witnessing was timeless. Outside the sands of time were shifting, but they couldn’t reach the monks sitting here. Beyond the walls of the monastery the years were passing, governments came and went, ideas rose and fell; here, it didn’t matter.
Outside, in the courtyard, a young novice practiced cricket bowls, bouncing a ball against the monastery wall. By the time I forced myself to leave, for I’d been in the monastery for hours and I still needed to find a place where to sleep, he’d been joined by an Indian tourist.
It was only when I was halfway down to Karu, having failed to find an open homestay in Hemis, that it occurred to me that I’d forgotten to check out that snow leopard pelt. Somehow, however, it didn’t matter. I could see more monasteries up ahead.
