THE SACRED MOUNTAIN

This article in EnVols, in-flight magazine of Air France is a result of our hosting Mathiew Palain and photographer Benjamin Malapris in Bhutan.

Landlocked between China and India, and no bigger in size than Switzerland, Bhutan is considered the jewel of the Himalayas. Also the birthplace of the “Gross National Happiness” concept, the South Asian country has become a master of the art of cultivating its environmental heritage and protecting its mountains, which remain unclimbed by humans. It’s a trekker’s paradise at the very summit of the world, which the French writer Mathieu Palain ventured to for himself.

This morning, remembering that she was coming to meet us at the airport, Dorji had put on a kira, the traditional Bhutanese dress, adorned with a brooch depicting the nation’s king. Underneath the tunic, she is still wearing her heavy-duty hiking shoes, which come up to her ankles. From the moment we get off the plane, she insists on driving all the way to Rinpung Dzong, a Buddhist temple built on a hillside some 600 years ago. She greets a monk draped in a toga at the entrance before heading towards the prayer room, taking off her shoes and bowing down to a smiling Buddha. “What did you ask him?” I enquire as she does up her laces. “I prayed that nothing would happen to us.”

 Dorji is 33 years old, unmarried and has no children. She is one of the only women in the whole of Bhutan to work as a high mountain guide – a career she dreamed about for years before allowing herself to take the leap. At the age of 20, she worked in a factory producing yoghurts. Her job consisted of being up to her elbows in fermented milk with a hairnet on her head. Meanwhile, her only experience of travelling abroad was for an intensive training course in Thailand. She has no memories of the country itself, aside from the stifling heat. When she left work every evening, the stale, warm and stuffy air that filled the city always took her by surprise.

 To begin with, people laughed in her face. “You, a guide?” they would sneer. “The very idea of it! Women aren’t cut out for that job. What if you came up against a brown bear? Or a snow leopard?” Every single agency turned their back on her, but she was determined. So, tomorrow, it’s Dorji who will be guiding us to Jomolhari. Standing at 7,326 metres (24,035 ft) tall, it’s the second-highest peak in Bhutan. We agree not to attempt to reach the summit and to instead admire it from a distance. Unlike in Nepal, China, India and Pakistan, mountain climbing is banned in this small nation. That means no planting a flag in the powdery snow at the summit or taking a triumphant selfie. Bhutan’s mountains just can’t be conquered. At best, adventurers can enjoy a walk along the slopes, but the summit is out of bounds. After all, it is the house of the gods.

 For this expedition, Dorji has enlisted the help of Chef Rigzin, his assistants Tenzin and Jigme, Sonam, a groom, and six horses to haul the food, tents, camping stove and sleeping bags along with us, as well as all of the essentials we need to survive the wintry conditions.

The first day takes us on a 22-kilometre (14-mile) trek along an icy mountain stream, which is translucent and even turquoise in places where the rapids are at their least ferocious. The hours go by, and we walk over less-than-safe-looking bridges to get from one bank to the next. Dorji runs across them. “I can’t swim”, she admits. “Can you?” I nod, gazing into the bluish waters below. If I did happen to fall in, I’d rather freeze to death than show off my swimming skills.

At 1 p.m., Jigme suggests that we have lunch – namely rice, chicken, mushrooms and boiled spinach. It’s fascinating to discover how much better food tastes when you’re out in the wilderness. If you open a tin of sardines on the summit of Mont Blanc, you appreciate just how delicious the fish is – not to mention the fact that it doesn’t leave a nasty metallic taste in your mouth like when you toss it into a bowl of pasta in the comfort of your own apartment. I help myself to more chicken and offer the plate to Dorji. “I’m vegetarian”, she says. “I used to be a real carnivore – chicken, beef, I’d eat it all… But when I was 13, I saw a man slaughter a yak, and since then I just can’t bring myself to do it anymore.”

With that, she lifts her eyes to the sky and says, “We don’t have time to dawdle. The snow is on its way.” And indeed, as we reach the 3,000-metre (10,000-ft) mark, we each put on a thicker pair of gloves and a flurry of flakes begins to cover our path. When we get to the next bridge, a man emerges from a cave carved into the rock face. “Come and warm yourselves up”, he says. “We’ve made some tea.” I politely decline, pointing out that we still have a way to go and that night is drawing in, but the man insists, so I sit down next to Dorji and Benjamin, the photographer, by the fireside with a mug of much-too-sweet tea. Five soldiers are huddled together at the back of the cave. They’re Indian, and on a commando training course learning to toughen up in the Himalayan winter. They nibble on lentil and potato pancakes. In two months’ time, if everything goes to plan, they’ll be back in Delhi again.

At 3,600 metres (11,800 ft), we reach the refuge – a shack guarded by a gruff yet smiley man who happens to be missing his top and bottom front teeth. He lives there with his dog and a load of scrawny cats who are currently meowing around the stove, demanding strokes and bowls of milk. I step inside, and for a minute I can’t see a thing. The little lamp only lights up its immediate surroundings, and the embers aren’t glowing brightly enough to reveal the faces of the weary travellers. Eventually, my eyes adjust to the darkness, and I spot a sleeping man curled up in the fetal position. Then a young boy takes a mobile phone out of his pocket and the bluish glow of the screen illuminates his adolescent features. It’s difficult to imagine, but the people of Bhutan didn’t have electricity up until fairly recently. They burnt firewood to keep themselves warm. They played outside. They washed their clothes in rivers. Bhutan remains one of the only countries in the world which can claim to have a negative carbon footprint, but even if the Gross Happiness Index continues to be an indicator of wealth, it would be misleading to say that the population has turned its back on globalisation. Television is here to stay, the Internet has taken the nation by storm, and few people would be surprised to encounter a child in a remote refuge on the Tibetan border engrossed in YouTube and its algorithms. Dorji joins me by the stove. She takes off her gloves, undoes her jacket and places her palms against the cooking pot, which will be used to cook the rice a little later on. She sighs. Outside, the temperature plummets to below −15 °C (5 °F).

 In the middle of the night, the camp is woken up by a dog howling. It goes on for a while – five, ten, fifteen minutes. Then, for some unknown reason, the dog suddenly stops and we drift off to sleep again. Upon waking, we spot large, deep, feline footprints in the fresh snow surrounding the tent. A snow leopard… That explains why the dog was barking at the top of its voice. Scared off by the predator, the horses had fled; Sonam later found them more than two kilometres (1.2 miles) away from their pen. Dorji studies the footprints, noticing paws of two different sizes. “It was a mother and her cub.”

We set off walking again, following in their footsteps. Since snow leopards are no longer shot by yak owners, they have been left without a predator. Their population has increased by 40% in seven years. I move forward, hoping to catch its eye as it sweeps through the snow-covered larch landscape. It’s there. Right up close. It can see us.

We pass the 4,000-metre (13,000-ft) mark and the forest disappears, making way for rocky tundra and short grass cropped back by the blistering cold. There are now too many yaks around to count. At 3 p.m., as if on schedule, the sky turns hazy and the snow returns – we see it arrive from a distance, and it falls softly, in large flakes. Then it comes in faster flurries and continues until the following day, when the sun peeks over the summit to the east and melts it all with its authoritative glare.

A traveller approaches our group. He’s about fifty, his teeth stained from doma, a wad of red tobacco that people chew in the mountains to stave off hunger and headaches.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asks.

“Jomolhari.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Why?” Dorji laughs.

“No-one climbs up there in winter. It’ll be −30 °C (−22 °F) and the shack doesn’t have any heating.”

Later, upon arrival at the base camp, it all makes sense. We find gappy floorboards and weather-beaten shutters that let in the icy wind. On one of the beams, a traveller has carved their name, the date of their journey and two words in English (“freezing cold!!”), which most people could understand no matter their native tongue. We go through bowl after bowl of soup to warm ourselves up. Dorji rubs her thighs to keep the blood circulating. Tomorrow, we will tackle the final ascent. But tomorrow is another day. At this point in time, it is 5 p.m. and −14 °C (6.8 °F).

In the middle of the night, Benjamin, the photographer, is struck by a violent headache. It must be the high altitude, fatigue, jet lag… He drops an aspirin into a bottle of water and discovers, to his great surprise, that the tablet has frozen inside it. It’s now −26 °C (−14.8 °F). Crystals are forming inside our sleeping bags. I slip my feet into my shoes; they feel as though they are made of stone.

In spite of this, I manage to make it out of my tent to witness Jomolhari staring me right in the face. It had been there all along – its summit bathed in sunlight, sitting atop towering icy pillars, or seracs, which form a colossal snowy wall. Dorji had been right; the mountain really was like an honourable older lady to be admired from afar, without being disturbed.

To get a better look at it, we turn our backs to the mountain and set our sights on a trail winding uphill to reach an altitude of 4,600 metres (15,000 ft) via a series of tight switchbacks. At this altitude, even the slightest movement takes a great deal of effort. We’re short of breath, our heartbeats hammering in our temples. We grit our teeth and discover two twin lakes behind the summit. Both frozen. I grab a rock and throw it as hard as I can to test how thick the ice is. It makes a thudding sound, followed by a chorus of cracking noises. It’s too dangerous. We climb up to the second lake. This one draws its water from the glacier. Two yaks watch me as I place one foot, then the other, on the frosty surface. As I reach the middle of the lake, I spin around to marvel at the sight of the Jomolhari mountain bedecked with a crown of clouds. I think of Edmund Hillary, the first person to climb Mount Everest. When he was asked by a journalist why he was determined to attempt the ascent, Hillary, with his oh-so-British stiff upper lip, replied, “Well, I want to climb it because it’s there.” I look closely at this magical mountain. I ask myself why I have come all this way. Why in winter, with the freezing cold nights and intense altitude? “Because it’s there.”

This article is written by Mathieu Palain. He is the most exciting new voice in narrative non-fiction in France. As a journalist and writer, he is fascinated by people whose perspectives often go unheard. Palain’s first novel, Sale gosse [Little Brat] (L’Iconoclaste, 2019), tells the brutal and deeply moving tale of a young boy taken in by the French youth legal protection services. In 2021, he published Ne t’arrête pas de courir [Don’t Stop Running] (L’Iconoclaste, 2021, Interallié Prize), the story of a champion 400-metre runner originally from Mali, who is in prison for committing thefts and burglaries. Over a period of two years, the author goes to meet him every week in the institution’s visiting room. Palain’s latest novel, Nos pères, nos frères, nos amis [Our Fathers, Our Brothers, Our Friends] (Les Arènes, 2023), is a uniquely powerful and immersive investigation into violence against women