have any impact on his singing. I’m impressed. There’s no room for him to pass just here, so I continue until there’s a broadening of the trail where the shrubbery is not so dense. There I stand back, but Speedy decides to stop too, leans his doko against a convenient rock, adjusts the namlo on his sweating forehead, and gives me a wide grin. His song has ended, but I figure it would be good to have it on tape as a record of the journey, so pull my hand-sized recorder from my pocket and give him a demonstration. He speaks, and I play his voice back to him. Eyes wide with wonder, he takes the tape recorder from me to examine. ‘Ramro,’ he says. I sing a few phrases, play them back and point to him. ‘Will you sing for me?’
He understands my request and willingly gives a rendition of the song he’d been singing only moments before. Then we resume our journey together. But the young lad soon draws ahead, singing a different song this time, his plastic flip-flops slapping a rhythm of their own on the bare-earth trail, while I jog behind trying to record more of this very special soundscape.
Together we make rapid progress along the trail, which now slopes downhill before easing along a more open flank of the Milke Danda. A broad valley lies far below the ridge – the same valley that was drowned by the cloud-sea at dawn. Now I see it is patched with trees and small villages, and on its far side hillsides are cleft with streams draining the Singalila Ridge where cloud-shadows ripple their own journeys.
After less than three hours of walking we return to the crest to gain a view onto a dip in the ridge where two lines of simple houses face one another across a paved street. To the left of the houses there’s another small pond, which gives the village its name – Gupha Pokhari. ‘Pokhari’, Max later explains in his eagerness to educate me, means ‘lake’. Beside the pond I notice the blue tarpaulin that signals our lunch stop. But it’s only 10.30!
A stone-built chautaara stretches along the centre of the village street. Our porters have stopped here; their dokos are leaning on the wall, and their sticks – on which they take the weight of their loads when resting briefly on the trail – are hooked on the baskets. Inside two of the bhattis I recognise familiar faces drinking tea, peering out at nothing in particular as I wander past through a haze of wood smoke, pausing to study shops that display a few packets of biscuits, cigarettes, small bottles of the local Kukri rum and brightly coloured hair ribbons – but little else.
Life in Gupha Pokhari is unhurried. Outside one of the buildings a woman seated at a loom weaves a scarf in the November sunshine. Beside her an older woman with wrinkled face and the faintest hint of grey in her hair spins wool, while next door a young man pedals a sewing machine. On the other side of the chautaara a hen with a brood of yellow velcro chicks scratches the earth between stone slabs as a bare-bummed child toddles from one of the houses, squats in the street and looks in amazement at the arc of pee which comes from his tiny willy. ‘Did I do all that?’ he appears to ask. Rising from sleep a black dog yawns, then turns his head to nip at a flea before slumping back to sleep once more.
I turn my back on the buildings and wander across the meadow to where Mingma and the cook-boys are preparing a meal.
Mingma kneads a round of dough. Indre takes it from him, rolls it into flat discs which he lightly forks, then drops them one by one into a pot of boiling fat, where they rapidly swell to become what our cook calls Tibetan bread. Someone thrusts a mug of hot fruit juice at me as I slide my daypack to the ground. ‘Thanks,’ I say; ‘Dhanyabaad.’
Seated on the blue tarpaulin the group is beginning to gel. Some are discussing the morning’s journey, while others write diaries or read a book. Max fiddles with his camera, polishing the lens with a tissue. He’ll be taking no more long views today, though, for clouds are boiling out of a far valley, and one by one the mountains are being swallowed by them. Yet still the sun beams down upon us.
The group consists of seven men and two women, plus Bart the leader and Dawa the sirdar. And Mingma the cook, seven Sherpas and cook-boys, and 26 porters, half a dozen of whom are female – the bright-eyed Sherpanis who keep very much to themselves. This army of 45 is by far the largest I’ve ever trekked with, but such is the scale of the landscape that it’s easy to wander alone whenever I feel the need – as I do now and then – for I’m eager to absorb as much of this country as I can without distraction.
To ensure no one is lost or left behind, there’s always one Sherpa walking ahead to mark the way with an arrow scratched in the dust or on a convenient rock whenever the trail divides, and there’ll be another at the back to scoop up any stragglers. A third Sherpa, an anxious-looking Tibetan, carries a Tilly lamp and keeps his eye on the porters. He’ll need that lamp tonight.
Along the Milke Danda we trek the afternoon hours, at first making an easy contour of the right-hand slope, then heading onto an obvious saddle, followed by a short climb up the crest to a cluster of prayer flags hanging limply from bamboo wands. ‘Om mani padme hum’ drips from them. Now we descend below the flags on a corrugated clay path that takes us in and out of rhododendron woods, through tiny villages consisting of no more than half a dozen timber-and-bamboo houses, and up once more to a view of a solid-looking wall of cumulus where the Himalaya should be.
Camp is set on a terraced meadow within an arc of woodland. Speedy is already there when we arrive, his doko unpacked, a song on his lips as he gathers dry wood for a fire. An overhanging rock provides shelter for the cook, who has a brew stewing in a kettle. Mugs are passed round, and as evening gathers someone points out that the clouds have gone. Above the trees Kangchenjunga hovers in the flush of alpenglow.
Darkness falls, but some of our porters have not yet arrived, and as we eat our meal by the light of a hurricane lamp, heads turn uphill at the slightest sound in the hope that the missing men are coming. An hour drifts by. Then another. Some of the group go to their tents. A bottle of whisky does the rounds, for it’s cold here at almost 3000 metres, and the sky is studded with stars. Then suddenly a faint glimmer of light is detected in the black pitch of the wooded hill. Voices are heard, and half an hour later the Tibetan porter-guide with long jet-black hair braided in a pigtail arrives with the weary stragglers, for whom it’s been a long day.
I beat the dawn in order to be ready to photograph Kanch as the great mountain emerges from night. Frost has painted the grass around our camp, and blanketed porters congregate wherever fires have been lit. The dawn chorus is loud with coughing, and with throats and nostrils being emptied.
Breakfast over, I’m saddened to discover that Speedy is being paid off, and am unconvinced by Dawa’s explanation that he’s asked to go home, for the expression on his face suggests otherwise. I fear he’s been victimised as an individual who stands out from the crowd. Although the youngest of our porters by far, Speedy has been carrying an adult’s load with surprising ease. What’s more, he almost runs along the trail, singing as he goes. By comparison (and I accept it’s an unfair one to make) the rest of the porters appear weak, lazy and slow. I also wonder whether the fact that I’d been seen recording his songs might have counted against him – a sign of favouritism, perhaps, leading to jealousy? If so, it’s something I regret, so when I’m certain no one is looking, I hand him a clutch of rupee notes, which he secretes inside a fold of his shirt and makes his departure back the way we’d come.
By the time we’re on our way the frost has melted, and sunbeams shaft into the forest to illuminate huge spiders’ webs strung across the trail. Lianas hang almost to the ground, and grotesque tumours of moss lend some of the trees a Disneyesque appearance. All that is needed is a haunting melody to set them dancing. I sense that the forest has eyes. It also has sounds. Birds call to one another and cicadas tune up as we burst out into the eye-squinting splendour of unrestricted sunshine.
Now that we’ve arrived at the end of the Milke Danda’s spur, the hills spill in a convex slope for 2000 metres to the Tamur Khola. For much of the way there’s a vast staircase of terraces on which tiny
