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his place and the service began. It is quite impossible to describe the pleasure and reassurance this ordinary little service gave me. The bongo drums and squiffy fifes brought it all back to me. It was like the plunging hooves of pack mules as they floundered on one of those narrow paths before falling into the ravines below. In a trice the rocky landscapes came into my mind. Always the question of height was the thing. The abysses were literally measureless for on those mountain paths the bandages of dense mist floated below as well as above you. Often one threw a boulder and stood waiting to see when, if ever, it would strike bottom. The waterless mountains of Nepal with their richly-oxygenated air and eternal snow-cloud shapes hiding secret monasteries – I could recover it all through this weird and tilting music. The drumming of hooves on rock! On those vertiginous paths, of course, mules frequently did go overboard – being such foolishly obstinate creatures. There was no room to manoeuvre so that the story was frequently told of them plunging over these precipices in a shower of stones. I had forgotten so many little things! I had forgotten just how physically dirty one could become for lack of water, living in a lamasery at ten thousand feet. Those sweetly enticing cloud-shape monasteries which look so good in photos were often pitiless and barren nooks good for nothing except contemplation and self-discovery through the altering of the mind’s axis, through the art of breathing. At some point, in the stuffy intellectual attic of the quotidian mind a key clicked home, or a pane of glass was smashed, and the pure air rushed in to oxygenate the spirit of the contemplant. Water was as precious as it is in the waterless islands of the Aegean, and what was left over from the winter storms was kept for tea. Illness is comparatively rare up there in those fastnesses probably because though the lama’s spiritual search is strenuous his daily life is anchored to a notion of living without tension, without stress – and the primal root of the disharmony which, in Taoist terms, set off illness is precisely stress. I recalled all this while the service rolled on its way with the chanting and drumming; here and there in it, too, there occurred passages which sounded suddenly as if they were of Indian, even western, provenance. Graceful light airs which suggested Indian peasant songs, or even Scottish ballads; these only hovered for a moment and then returned back to the central gruffness of the two-tone melodic scheme, driven onward by the quavering trump of the bagpipes – squash a goose or a three-month baby slowly and you would get something like this hellish quaver. Then sizzle-bang-boom, the triangles and the big drum took over and the monks began their prostrations; some of them were young Frenchmen, and one hoped it was not just a romantic fad with them to learn Tibetan and turn Buddhist; or just a despairing backlash from the mental self-indulgence of Paris with its tedious mystagogues relentlessly complicating the obvious by giving it fancy names … From Fraud to Freud and back again. Mind you, there would be much to excuse if this were actually the case. I know that if I were condemned to be a French intellectual of today I would certainly leap on the nearest mule and head for Lhasa. Slowly the service ran out of current like an electric train and, sliding down an inclined plane, came to rest on the pulse-beat of the bongo drum, while everyone relaxed and smiled round at his or her neighbour in congratulation; as if it had all been a huge success and entirely due to the wholesale co-operation of us all, which perhaps was really the case. It was breakfast time now, and everyone was thoroughly awake and good-humoured. One saw people more clearly, saw their natures and the roles they played in coming here for the Tibetan New Year. There were one or two very beautiful old ladies and some handsome