Longreads

On the exhausting holy pilgrimage to do a kora around Mount Kailas in Tibet.

"My first sight of Kailas was from the 4,500m Thalladong pass in the foothills to its south. This is a sight of planetary strangeness. At my feet stretched the haunted Rakshas Tal – the Lake of Demons, home of vicious water spirits – curving out of sight in a crescent of peacock blue. Beyond it floated the snowlit cone of Kailas. Its abrupt solitude, suspended 50 miles away above the brilliance of the lake, lent it the feel of something self-created. It was easy to imagine it holy to any people, at any age. Nothing – not a tree or a dwelling – showed around the lake. Its small monastery had been levelled into the rocks during the Cultural Revolution and never rebuilt."

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