You can cross the Himalayas to reach the Spiti Valley, hidden beyond some of the most ragged peaks of this high-altitude reach. What you find is a cupping bowl of Buddhist life and learning that has survived intact

‘At last they entered a world within a world – a valley of leagues where the high hills were fashioned of a mere rubble and refuse from off the knees of the mountains…”Surely the gods live here,” said Kim, beaten down by the silence and the appalling sweep and dispersal of the cloud-shadows after rain. “This place is no place for man.” ‘

When Kim and the lama reached the Tibetan border on their pilgrimage to the lama’s homeland, Rudyard Kipling described what they saw with these words. His description of this high-altitude cleft through the Himalayas on the Indo/Tibetan border does not need to be updated.

The area lies on the border region between Zanskar and Uttar Pradesh. It has saved itself from the ravages of the backpackers and marijuana seekers of the Andrex Trail by hiding behind political confusion. The valley slammed its borders shut when the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1950. Thus it remained untouched, preserving its Tibetan culture in a state of anachronism protected by its political allegiance to India. The once-forbidden lands of Spiti and next door Kinnaur have now begun tentatively to open their doors to the adventurous and the inquisitive.

Once you have run the gauntlet of the permit ordeal and the millefeuille layers of Indian bureaucracy, you can cross the Himalayas to reach the Spiti Valley, hidden beyond some of the most ragged peaks of this high-altitude reach. What you find is a cupping bowl of Buddhist life and learning that has survived intact. It is a microcosm of what Tibet might have been, if Mao Tse-Tung’s Red Army had not moved, locust-like, across the Buddhist kingdom.

The people of the valley weave their lives around a labyrinth of demons, saints and followers. Their religious rituals shroud themselves in mystic diversity. Their profound Buddhism runs parallel with their daily lives. The shrines in their homes are spattered with cooking fat and they recite a mantra (holy phrase) in the same breath as they yell at a yak. It is a comfortable co-existence of life and religion bound with an agrarian culture that is thick with scenes from medieval etchings of rural life. Inevitably, this slice of virgin land is grist to the mill of the Indian tourist industry.

There is a way to enter the valley by foot, a route across the Pin-Parvati La (pass) out of Himachal Pradesh. This occasionally hair-raising approach brings you into the head of the valley, with its layered rock strata and sculptured sides and sense of complete isolation. It must be about as close as we can now get to the feeling of discovery experienced by those who really were the intrepid explorers of the past.

The Spiti Valley is arid and sparse, both in vegetation and population. The surrounding peaks keep both the monsoon and the outside world at bay. The valley walls are dragged with colour like the fly leaves of Florentine books; the needle peaks thread the clouds and the Spiti river runs the same colour as the local turquoise around the necks of the women in the villages. It is hard to describe what you see; the mind of the observer soars into verbal orbit, or flounders in a stream of cliches.

The people of Spiti have flat, Tibetan faces, their skin sucked dry by the high altitude. They bend over in the small barley fields, terraced out of the mountainsides, cutting the sheaves with sickle moon scythes. They crow, scattering smiles, when a stranger enters their village. They drag visitors into their homes with benign enthusiasm. They sit by their yak dung fires and cough in the acrid smoke and make butter tea for their unsuspecting guests. (Butter tea is a fairly foul concoction involving butter, tea, yaks’ milk and too much salt). They babble and hang around any visiting campsites, with their sickly children and infertile relatives, in the belief that all foreigners are doctors and purveyors of televisions and blue jeans.

In the autumn they tie their yaks, ponies, mules and donkeys in lines around the village threshing posts and trample the barley crop. The village girls spit out the chaff as they winnow with wooden forks and sing about their dowry jewels. The men shout behind the lines of animals as they circle around the threshing post or crouch on the periphery of the action, watching and overseeing. Lines of men, women and children carry the dried barley up from the tiny fields in great conical back baskets that dwarf them and bend them double. At night they huddle in the dark in their flat-roofed houses and wonder what they can sell to the tourists. They whisper about the foreigners bringing power lines and television to their villages.

Maya is fourteen and lives with her family in one of the villages. Her brother has taught her quite a lot of English because he is a monk and has recently returned from an eighteen-month study trip to America. He has told Maya that in America poor girls marry rich men.

“Do you think that they will find me pretty in America?” she asks. It is difficult to know what to say to a beautiful fourteen-year-old mountain girl with thick, matted hair, turquoise and coral in her ears and high altitude lines around her young eyes. There is a momentary vision of her plucked, scraped and trussed up in lycra and high heels. How do you tell her that the thin layers of ancient cotton clothing are an important part of her beauty, or that America is huge and huge and all-consuming?

“If I could find husband in America, I could have house with servants and one for my mother and father.” It is impossible to explain that only oil barons and the president’s entourage have servants in America. “My grandfather is an important man in the village. He has houseboy and a servant for cooking and one for washing.” She brushes the chaff out of her hair. “I think I will go to America when I have new pair of shoes.”

If you were stuck in a village on the side of a mountain, and you believed all that lay between you and the end of a lifetime of winnowing was a new pair of shoes, those shoes would be fairly high on your list of priorities. If you were young and good-looking, and saw your mother’s face dug deep with lines when she was only thirty-three, America would be the greener grass.

Nearly all of the smallholdings in Spiti are subsistence farms; hand to mouth to belly and out again. The principal crop is barley but there are some farmers who have diversified and managed to turn themselves into local money-spinners. Peas have become the green gold of the area.

Charingtobe is the pea man of Kibber. His village is said to be the highest in the world and when people ask him if this is true he does not deny it. He stands in his field and talks about why he does not want to send his children away to schools and universities.

“My boys must stay my boys. If they are taught about politics they will want to sit on the chairs in The White House. If they find out too soon how big the world is then my pea fields will seem very small to them. Our home will be a prison if they want to fly.” He takes off his new sunglasses and uses them to indicate the fields around him; patches of irrigated green among the dusty duns of the mountains.

“If they go to the cities what will they find? Girls who will give them diseases, not just diseases that will make them scratch but diseases that will make them look at our village girls in a different way. That is not the education that will make them good pea farmers. They will forget about Sakadawa (the Buddhist festival to celebrate the birth, death and enlightenment of The Lord Buddha) and Lhabab Duchen (the festival celebrating Buddha’s return to earth after his ascent to heaven to teach his mother). They will forget the colour of their mother’s eyes and the taste of her tsampa (the regional mainstay of roasted barley flour). They will forget how to sew up the pea sacks so they do not burst on the bad roads to the Delhi markets.

“The monks will teach them to write and understand. If they can sign their names, read contracts from the Delhi market men and spot leaf mould before it has taken over the crop, they will be contented farmers. That is all I knew when I took my wife and started to farm these fields. The other things I have found out for myself when I needed to.” The pea man bends down and picks a pod. He splits it open and slides the peas into his mouth in one movement. His son, squatting beside him, does the same.

Near to their village is the gompa (monastery) of Kye, clinging to the edge of the valley. It houses an important library of Buddhist scriptures. Here monks sit in the raking afternoon light sifting through ancient parchment mantras smuggled in from Tibet. The monks dust off the curling gold letters on the parchment and reassemble them before they are filed into the library in the fragmented Tibetan section. Further down the valley on the flat flood plain is the gompa of Tabo. It was once one of the biggest Tibetan training monasteries. Even though there are fewer monks, the gompa is still thriving.

The people of Spiti have a system of polyandry and primogeniture to combat the short supply of resources that are available in the raw mountains. It means that younger brothers may live with their elder brothers, who alone have the right to marry. The attitude of each family will govern the laxity of the marriage and the sharing arrangements of wives. Alternatively, male siblings enter monasteries and gompas, thus keeping the faith well-manned.

Tabo, an ancient sand-coloured gompa, was founded in the 10th century. Novice monks come to the gompa when they are seven. They live there and learn the Buddhist teachings and disciplines. Their home is the courtyard next to the main gompa and they sleep in cells arranged around great beds of sunflowers. The shaven-headed boys run backwards and forwards, their heads barely the same height as the sunflowers; a flurry of ochre robes rushing to the evening puja (prayers).

A boy stops in the doorway of the courtyard. He looks younger and smaller than a normal seven year old. He is carrying a pair of new window frames across his narrow shoulders. He is on his way to the new prayer hall that they are building. The boy is framed three times: once by the doorway, the second time by his load and ultimately by the velvet glow of the sunset. His face is a mixture of youth and wisdom; the boy who tumbles in the dust with his fellow novices and cries when he bruises his knees and the wise man who recites the mantras with the same regularity as his heartbeat, the man who will carry his gompa into the next millennium.

The people of Spiti are bound together by their Buddhist faith and the harshness of their environment. They respect both things and live within their parameters, reaffirming their belief in both throughout each day. The Dalai Lama has a vision of a free Tibet where the peoples of the world can find solace from the ‘struggle of life’. Spiti is now a serene valley with open-hearted people and a roaring turquoise river; a small place of solace. But where the visitors explore the sharks will soon follow. It is probably an impossible ideal to hope that the people of Spiti will still be the same in ten years’ time. It would be a great victory to be able to return and find it unchanged.