I had seen photographs of Kailash before I saw Kailash. None had prepared me for the silence. It was not the silence of an empty landscape, but one that seemed to possess a presence of its own. The journey from Kolkata through Kathmandu, Timure, Gyirong and Saga, across the Nepal-China border and the immense Tibetan plateau, gradually carried me away from the familiar world. Then came altitude, the thin air, disturbed sleep, exhaustion and the slow discipline of acclimatisati