The Indian summer of Tibet.

I HAVE SPENT three weeks in Tibet, "where the mountains ar high and the land is pure," as a seventh-century hymn put it. I have traveled more than 1,300 miles by bus, army truck, and hiking boots, and have gone up to 18,000 feet on Mount Everest. I have seen more of Tibet than 98 per cent of all Western visitors, ever. I must tell the tale.

Tibet, an indenpendent country and culture by the Chinese Communists in 1950, but was not really crushed till after its terrible rebellion of 1956-59. Its Dalai Lama was forced to flee to India. Mao shut all monasteries and destroyed many with 105-mm. cannon. Monks and nuns were forcibly married and/or raped. Many monks were imprisoned; some were castrated and killed; a few abbots were killed by having their ears drilled with a brace and bit and molten lead poured into their brains, or by having their eyes scooped out with spoons and their brains scooped out through the eye sockets. Popular piety was suppressedd Pilgrimage, prostration, prayer flags on one's house, an "OM Mani Padme Hum" in one's mouth--all brought death. Perhaps a million tibetans, out of six million, were killed or exiled. Tens of thousands of widows were rape-married to Chinese soldiers. This is the face of Communism.

There was little left for the gangs of Chinese "Cultural Revolutionaries" to wreck, from 1966 on. Mao died in 1976, and his eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, apparently horrified, relaxed religious persecution and econimic exploitation from 1979 on, in order to reconcile Tibetans to permanent Chinese rule. A few temples and 13 monasteries were reopened. Buddhist piety was decriminalized. Prayer flags and wheels reappeared everywhere in Tibet, which re-emerged as a solidly--blatantly--national and Buddhist entity.

A few thousand foreigners have been allowed into Tibet in the last five years. They have been told that all the destructions and horrors were wrought by the Gang of Four. Some found out better. Peking became alarmed. The Tibetan national/religious revival was going too far. In 1983 liberalization gained momentum in Tibet while being cut back by Peking. Foreign visits were restricted while a new wave of repression broke in September and October. It was to this reviving, burgeoning, but again threatened Tibet, to this Indian summer of Tibetan culture perhaps faced with its final winter, that I came in mid-September 1983.

A haunting scene in the way to the airport in Szechwan: Hours before dawn many great hay wagons were being dragged by straining, agonizing pairs of young women, chained like horses to the yokes. The flight was eight hundred mile long, over forested gorges, snowy mountains, and arid ridges. We landed at Lhasa airport, and forbidden, dreamlike Tibet became ordinary polluted by my being able to get there.

Foreigners are housed in a Chinese colonialist walled army compound, a semi-safe four miles from the city of Lhasa. Communists can destroy the old world and build a new one in its place, but they can't keep a toilet working; as the days went by, our excrement slowly piled up into a revolting pigsty, and more magic of Tibet evaporated.

The altitude, 11,700 feets, hits you in the lungs and stomach. But there across four miles of yak meadows was Lhasa, beneath the dramatic shadows and delicate green sunny slopes of its mountains, under world-class clouds and a steel blus sky. And there was the Potala Palace of the Dalai Lamas, red, white, and golden-topped on its mid-valley hill, a Wonder of the World.

We were jolted through the new Chinese city of Lhasa, a travesty of a new Soviet city, which is a travesty of a city. Like all imperialists, the Chinese have brought straight, tree-lined avenues, motorized transport, sewers, hospitals, schools, threaters, and athletic fields. Many Western visitors so identify these things with civilization that they think them well worth the price exacted: Tibetan freedom, religion, culture, soul.

But in old, pre-Communist Lhasa, a town less than half a mile across, the marvelous, complex structure of Tibetan culture was quickly revealed. The world knows the Buddhist, monastic, disciplined, mystical side of Tibet, but on the spot one sees the individual, undisiplined, assertive, highly colored, forceful, often violent, sometimes murderous side. Tibetan culture is an age-long tension and struggle between absorved Buddhist self-control and intrinsic Tibetan vehemence. A culture more directly opposite in spirit to the Chinese would be hard for an anthropologist to construct, and this, quite aside from Communism, has exacerbated the Chinese-Tibetan conflict. THE HOUSES of a Chinese village tend to recede delicately into the background. But Tibetan buildings blare out from the austere landscape. They are boldly whitewashed, with broad, slashing black bands around doors and windows and under eaves topped with winter fuel and yak-dung patties, all garnished wih brightly colored details. The serene and mystic monasteries scream at you from a dozen miles away with violently contrasted blocks of maroon and white, great pylons from which, like drive-in movies screens, banners with faces one hundred feet high are hung, and golden roofs whose glitter fights the snows of the mountains.

Chinese rarely dress so as to emphasize their differences. But Tibetans all manage to look egregiously different. Their combed, braided, inhabited hair sports a wisp or two that unravels as the day goes on. The women's brilliant green or blue turbans, the men's loud, red cloth boots with yakshin heels and daggers in traceried sheaths, the jewelry of both sexes, by the pound, bosses of worked silver, necklaces and bracelets of big, crudely cut turquoises, corals, and black-and-white "Z stones"--all, especially their whole sheepskins coats, seem barbaric to the Chinese.

Chinese are usually self-controlled and conflict-avoiding in public. But Tibetan men swagger like texans; when they advance, Chinese and Westerners alike do well to stand to one side. They shove through crowds like warriors. Monks and women don't quite swagger, but they walk with firm, unashamed steps and anything but downcast eyes. Tibetans, no matter how poor, diseased, and wretched, stared at us, grinned at us, made uproarious remarks about us, and followed us about, usually with an exuberant Mexican friendliness, but sometimes they threw garbage. They begged freely from us and were overpowering in their capitalist from their bodies. Given the least response by us, they invited us to guzzle barley beer with them. Little boys clung to my fingers and led me down the streets to howls of laughter, smiled enchantingly, and begged for cigarettes and ballpoint pens.

Every Tibetan house was planted with branches or canes bristling with paper or cloth prayer flags, humble Buddhist prayers that were also vehement defiance of Communism. Many people twirled prayer wheels, sometimes menacingly in the direction of Chinese. In and near holy sites many Tibetans prostrated themselves on the filth-paved streets, flopping down hard. One wretchedly poor pilgrim wore the pilgrim's wooden mittens, which he clapped loudly as he prepared to prostrate in the mud and sewage and crawl a few inches toward the great Jokka Kang Temple a few blocks away, the traditionally most self-abnegating act known to any religion. then he rose proudly to his full height, glared at us, and clapped again. He was genuinely abasing himself, emptying himself of self-assertion to open himself to a Buddha--but he was also, simultaneously, calling all Lhasa's attention to himself, reasserting Tibetan Buddhist ways egregiously no matter who might not like it, saying plainly by his bodily actions, "Down with all foreigners! Away with the Chinese! To hell with Communism!" This was the essence of the wonderful, dialectically conflicting Tibetan character.

The Chinese no longer even tried to take us to factories and communes. We explored the great temples and monasteries--but this is not a Baedeker. Characteristically, symbolically, our visit to the Potala was transformed when we were swept into the making of a movie, into the crowds of extras in authentic or theartrical Tibetan costumes. We are probably in the movie, and it won't make much difference.

These shrines left us with two overwhelming impressions. One we tried to resist: This the Mysterious Orient of Victorian novels and Korda films--dark halls, crowded Duddhas, acres of gold and jewels glinting in the dim, religious light of thousands of yak-butter lamps, unceasing gongs ... The other gave us heart-warming joy: The hundreds of monks, the thousands of visitors, worshippers, pilgrims--all testified to the utter failure of Communist tyranny to wipe out an ancient, rich, and unique religious culture, and to the sturdy resurgence of Buddhism and Tibet itself, after an ethnocidal, genocidal horror rarely equaled even in this terrible century.

But we did not, as we were scheduled to, visit the great Ganden Monastery, 37 miles up the river from Lhasa. On the morning of September 18 the rumor reached us that Chinese Communist soldiers had arrested--again--every one of the three hundred monks who had returned to Ganden after twenty years of ruin to start rebuilding it, and were sending them to prison in China. There was a rumor that the monks. of Ganden were again unusually nationalist. there was a rumor that Tibetan nomads in the north had massacred a busful of Chinese. There was no conceivable way to verify any of these rumors, but Ganden remained off limits for the rest of our stay in Tibet. When I returned to America, tibetan exiles reported that more than 2,500 Tibetans were arrested in September and October in a new crackdown on nationalist sentiment, and that 23, at least, has been executed. Thus I was present at a significant turn in the history of a tormented country and could find out nothing.

Uncrushed, Tibetans during those three weeks opened their first exhibit of contemporary paintings, wholly un-Communist and strongly nationalist/religious. Likewise, they staged the premiere of the first Tibetan opera-ballet, gorgeously presented, with a strikingly Buddhist climax. Most cheering of all, we helped them celebrate October 1, the Chinese Communist founding holy day. Somehow the Tibetans managed to leave Mao, Communism, and China out of their celebration. We joined thousands of them in the Norbulinka Park, the summer-palace grounds of the Dalai Lamas. Here, on the grass, among the brightly colored pavilions, around the walled ponds and under the noble trees, families of Tibetans set up tented enclosures with briliant felt applique designs of Buddhist symbols and dragons, and devoted themselves for three days of Buddha-ordained glorious weather to eating 25-course meals and to reasserting Tibetan nationhood and defying Communist dicipline and prudery by getting smashed on barley beer.

We set out for Mount Everest, four hundred mile and three days'journey southwest. the agriculture of the Lhasa valley was seriously damaged by the Communist campaign to grow unsuitable wheat instead of hardy Tibetan barley. It flopped, of course, but not before this little caper of socialist planning had caused the death by starvation of thousands of Tibetan peasants and the ruination of thousands of acres of scarce, vulnerable Tibetan fields, whose delicate soil is now plastered as wind-blown sand one thousand feet up the valley walls.

The farther valleys, 12,000 to 15,000 feet, were more heartening, in spite of this year's meager harvest--green with vegetables and golden with harvested before our eyes, by man- and woman-power, with a tractor or two every fifty miles. Chanting villagers threshed great stacks of grain. Women gathered yak dung, vitally important for fertilizer as well as for fuel. Tibetans think gathering yak dung is a most proper job for women.

And the yaks were there--by the millions, in spite of the loss of half their number during collectivization. They are large, black, preternaturally hairy, primeval, Ice Age beasts, especially when they emerge dripping from icy streams. When thousands of them graze on 16,000-foot pastures beneath a great, snowy, 24,000-foot dome, an American thinks with a pang of our vanished buffalo. Above the green and gold valleys rise the mountain walls, part semi-desert pasture, part rockslide and scree, austerely beautiful like a more giant Neveda. We zigzagged up and up for hours a few times a day to reach passes, often at 17,300 feet, marked by piles of prayer stones and prayer flags. The air was thin and clear, the horizon immense, and we walked about uncertainly as if we were about to collapse. IN A DAY we reached Tibet's second city, Shigatse, the seat of the Dalai Lama's rival, the Panchen Lama, a tragic figure whose collaboration with the Chinese Communists brought him and Tibet no good. Another day brought us to Shegar, a town at 14,500 feet. Running up the 1,500-foot cliffs above it was once the Crystal Monastery, one of the holiest in Tibet. In 1960 the "People's Liberation Army" murdered all the monks, drew up a park of 105-mm cannon, and shelled the place to smithereens. The third day we switched to an army truck that hurled us back and forth over rocky tracks (the way most of the Third World has to travel), over the last 17,300-foot pass, and to our campsite in the very walls of the murdered and ruined Rongbuk Monastery at the foot of Mount Everest.

Rongbuk Monastery, at 16,500 feet, is the classic point from which to view Everest. The valley walls are oriented perfectly to frame Everest, all of Everest, and nothing but Everest. We could see the Everest is beautiful as well as mighty. the summit pyramid, with a gale wind blowing the famous snow plume east off its peak, floated on a cloud band a mile thick, above a sensational play of lights on the lower snows of the 10,000-foot north wall and the Rongbuk Glacier. Fifteen miles from the summit.

Two days later, still unacclimatized to 16,500 feet (just a little vomiting at dawn to perk one up for the day), we were bounced by our truck four miles up the valley to the North Everest Base Camp, at 16,900 feet, 11 miles from the summit of the now absolutely clear and preternaturally near Everest. This was the beginning of the holiest ground known to mountaineers. From here, in 1924, Mallory and Irvine set out on their tragic climb, perhaps to the summit of Everest, certainly to their deaths. Mountaineers are true modern heroes, combining science and precision tools with stregth, endurance, and courage. And unlike soldiers, they kill no one but themselves.

Here, on the broad, desolate gravel flats just below the half-mile-wide, gravel-covered snout of the Rongbuk Glacier, we found three base camps in separate, natty sets of roomy tents. The Swiss expedition has suffered a setback: Their leader's leg was broken in an avalanche, but he was heroically in his tent directing things. The French expedition had a summit team way up there at 26,400 feet, waiting for lesser winds for the summit dash. And the first Catalan Himalayan expedition ever had a summit team at 27,100 feet, also waiting. the wind stayed too cruel all during our five days at Everest; to this day I don't know if any of them made it. Two weeks later, and American expedition starting from the Kharta Glacier in Tibet east of Everest, after failures in 1981, 1982, and the spring of 1983, was at last successful. On October 8 three of its men climbed the hitherto unconquered east face of Everest; three more on October 9. The first team saw two Japanese and a Sherpa coming up from Nepal, who were killed later in the day trying to get down from the summit. Once more, Everest gave glory and death.

Our own expedition was more modest. From the base camp we walked four miles on top of the gravel-covered Rongbuk Glacier and up the gorge of the East Rongbuk Glacier to the site, at about 18,000 feet, of British Camp One--in sight of the fields of icy pinnacles on the glacier, eight miles from the summit. For me it was the end of the line. Tibet--the highest country--and Everest--the highest mountain--are at the existential extremes of human experience. In Tibet no man, and not event the whole people and the whole marvelous unique culture, can be sure of surviving through any given year. On Everest no man can be sure of surviving through the day. But a day on Everest is worth a cycle at home, And who can equal the infinite privilege of being a wretchedly poor and totally menaced tibetan? "Tibet, where the mountains are high and the land is pure."