terrain is so inhospitable that the area has been for centuries the subject of Tibetan myths of a promised land, of hidden valleys where the conditions for an ideal existence are secreted. All you need do is find the secret entrance to these places and your soul's pilgrimage will be at an end.
This is a scenario that's extraordinarily common in stories dealing with magic and spiritual knowledge worldwide. It's there in the wardrobe that leads into Narnia in C.S. Lewis' novels, platform nine and three-quarters in the Harry Potter books, and the rabbit hole which Alice falls into in Lewis Carroll's Victorian fantasies - and this is only to consider English fiction. Think of Odysseus and Aeneas visiting the underworld, Gilgamesh's underground journey, and Dante's three-tiered visit to the Catholic version of an afterlife and you begin to understand just how universal the human dream of escaping a world that's ambiguous and temporary, and going to one where life's absolutes can genuinely be encountered, actually is.
Is Tibet really like that? There seems little doubt that we all dream of somewhere that's mythic and unchanging, an ideal place where we "truly belong," and that Tibet fulfils that function for a large number of disillusioned modern people. What they'll find there once they arrive, especially today, is another matter. Claire Scobie found piles of human excrement, plastic bags and discarded beer bottles everywhere from Pemako to Mount Kailash, a place that's often considered the sacred heart of an everywhere more-or-less sacred landscape. And as for Lhasa, it's difficult to know what she really thinks of somewhere with elevators, tourist admission fees to the most famous sites, and Tibetan students waiting at the airport for flights back to their universities in China.
Even the great mythic places are subject to change, in other words. It's the human imagination that tends to return over and over again to the same archetypes. This is what the Dalai Lama (who Claire Scobie interviews) meant when he told her that the greatest searches are within you, and many spiritual seekers might frankly be better advised to stay happily at home.
RSS