On the holy pilgrim's trail

The demise of travel literature has been predicted for almost as long as commentators have anticipated the imminent fall of the House of Saud. In his 2008 travelogue Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, no less an authority than Paul Theroux dismissed the genre as "little better than a licence to bore ... the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing".

With the sparkling Patrick Leigh Fermor in his late nineties and Norman Lewis and Wilfred Thesiger already gone, the pantheon of great British travel writers has certainly been thinning in recent years. Yet for those of us who hope travel writing proves rather more durable than the squalid ruling dynasty of Saudi Arabia, the continued brilliance of Colin Thubron, president of the Royal Society of Literature, is a considerable consolation and welcome riposte.
Now in his seventies, Thubron still writes like a dream, as this slim volume bears elegant witness. The disarmingly entitled To a Mountain in Tibet sees him embarking on a remarkable journey not so much to a mountain as the mountain: Mount Kailas, the 22,000ft peak that is sacred to four religions and one-fifth of our planet. According to myth, it is the source of the universe.

For Buddhists and Hindus, together with Jains and the followers of the ancient, pre-Buddhist Bon faith, Kailas is the ultimate pilgrimage, an arduous 32-mile ritual circling of a starkly beautiful summit that rises high above an extraordinarily remote landscape. Pilgrims have made this difficult journey for centuries and each year the oxygen-starved air takes its toll, carrying off a number of the unfit or ill-prepared.

Having lost his mother, the last surviving member of his family, there is a powerfully personal aspect to this pilgrimage for Thubron, who undertakes it in a spirit of "fascinated estrangement", deeply engaged yet critically detached, perhaps the perfect perspective for a travel writer. For a Western reader this is an alien world of sky-dancers and demons, thrilling marvels and perpetual reincarnations, multiple gods and disturbing myths. He reflects sparingly - and all the more movingly - on the stabbing loss of his mother and, decades earlier, of his 21-year-old sister, killed in an avalanche that kept him away from mountains for years.

As ever, his descriptive powers rise to the occasion. A landscape of such fearful majesty requires a writer who can pay appropriate literary homage. Who else could write page after compelling page on rock formations without losing his reader? At the Tibetan border, "the ebbing waves of the Himalaya hang the sky with spires while ahead the land smoothes into an ancient silence". Thubron's mountains sound an often dark and uneasy atmosphere, "tremulous with cloud. It rolls from their clefts and seethes round their summits like battle smoke".

At once forensic and poetic in his observations, he is sympathetic and humane in his interaction with a human cast of isolated monks, credulous pilgrims and families pinned to ghettoised Himalayan villages desiccated by poverty. High-altitude ceremonies provide vivid, dream-like set-pieces. At the outset of the pilgrimage he describes the "shambling pomp" of a consecrating procession of monks drifting in and out of smouldering incense to the accompaniment of puffing 10-foot horns, conch shells and clashing cymbals, surrounded by crowds of ecstatic pilgrims crying, "Lha-gyel-lo-so-so! Lha-so-so! Lha-so-so! Victory to the Gods!" It is a mesmerising passage that recalls Leigh Fermor's writing on the rich pageant of the Greek Orthodox church.

The final stretch of his lung-shredding, knee-shattering trek begins in a rousing landscape of "charged sanctity". Here Thubron enters a "force field of intensified holiness" and captures the occasionally surreal drama of this processional path towards purification and redemption. This is a bold and brave journey, an elegiac book by a master of prose at the height of his powers.

Justin Marozzi, author of The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus, is writing a history of Baghdad.