The Secret at Amarnath

It began, as most things on Kailash did, with a question from her.

"Why do you wear skulls?" Parvati said. He had a garland of them at his neck, and she had looked at it for years without asking. "And why is it that everyone dies, and you do not?"

He was quiet for a long time.

"There is a story," he said at last. "The Amar Katha, the story of not dying. If I tell it to you, you will know."

"Then tell it."

"Not here. Not where anything that lives can hear."

He stood up, and she followed him, and they went north.

He set down everything that went with him, one thing at a time. At Pahalgam he turned to the bull.

"Stay here, Nandi."

The bull stayed. At Chandanwari he took the moon out of his hair and left it on the hillside. At the lake they call Sheshnag he took the serpents from his neck and let them go into the water. On the pass at Mahagunas he stopped and put a hand on his son's head.

"Wait for me here," he told Ganesha, and Ganesha sat down on the pass to wait.

At Panjtarni, where five streams meet, he set down the last of it, the five elements themselves: earth and water, fire and air and the sky. And there, with nothing left but the two of them, they danced.

The cave was high in the ice. He spread a deerskin on the floor for her to sit on, and then he called the fire, Kalagni, the fire that ends the world, and sent it round the cave. It burned every living thing: every blade of grass, every insect, everything that crept in the cracks of the rock. When it had gone there was nothing in that cave that breathed except the two of them.

Nobody saw the egg under the deerskin.

"Now," she said.

He told her. What he said is not written in any book, and the pilgrims who tell this do not pretend to know it. It was for her, and it stayed with her.

While he was speaking, the egg under the skin cracked, and two pigeons came out of it, and heard every word, and so they never died. The pilgrims who go up to the cave in summer say they see them still, the same two birds in the roof of the cave.

"Did he not know they were there?" you may ask. The pilgrims say he did not, and leave it at that; the question was never the point.

What they go up to see is the ice. Every summer a pillar of it rises on its own from the floor of the cave, and they say it is full at the full moon and almost gone on the dark nights, and that two smaller ones form beside it, one for Parvati and one for Ganesha, who waited on the pass.

The cave was found again, the pilgrims tell, by a Muslim shepherd named Buta Malik. A holy man gave him a sack of coal; at home it was gold; when he went back to say thank you, the holy man was gone and the cave was where he had stood. His family took a share of the offerings for generations after. The girl who argued with Shiva on the ridge above her father's city, in The Daughter of the Mountain, is the woman he led up this mountain alone. Of everything he had, this was the one thing he gave only to her.

The Kashmiri Pandits know a text behind the pilgrimage, the Bhringisha Samhita, and the tradition that keeps it does not begin with Parvati's question. It begins with the gods being afraid.

Mahakala, who is Time, came to the gods and told them a thing they had not known: that they too must die.

They went to Shiva.

"Protect us," they said. "Time has told us we will end."

He gave them the water of immortality, and they drank it. Then he went back into his meditation and hid himself, and when they looked for him afterwards he was nowhere. They searched every place they knew, and then they prayed, and at the end of their praying he showed himself to them in a cave in Kashmir as a pillar of ice. That, the tradition says, is where the pilgrimage to Amareshvara began: the gods going up to the ice to see the lord who had hidden from them.

The same tradition keeps her in the story too. Parvati, it says, asked Shiva for the secrets of life and of not dying. He taught her resting in that cave, and became the ice linga there, and a pair of snow pigeons overheard him and have been alive ever since. There is no fire in this telling and no egg; the birds were simply there.

The text's own concern is the road. Bathe at the Amur Veth, it says, and at the meeting of the waters at Panjtarni, and you are freed; walk the pilgrimage rightly and it is worth a horse sacrifice. The valley itself, the Pandits add, was once a lake, and the sage Kashyapa drained it, and the sage Bhringesha was the one who found the cave afterwards. He sent his disciples up to it, and Shiva gave him a staff, the Chhari Mubarak, and that staff still walks at the head of the yatra every summer, carried up from the valley to the ice.