Bells on a ridge

There are two stone lions on the steps, worn down to suggestions of lions, painted red at some point and mostly not any more. Above the door there is a row of brass bells on a rail, and you ring one on the way in, and the sound goes out over the valley and does not come back.

Rameshwor Mahadev is not a famous temple. It is a Shiva shrine on a ridge, a small stone building with a carved wooden frame around a dark doorway, and on the day I sat on its steps there was nobody else there at all.

The ordinary ones

This is the thing I keep coming back to about this country. The temples that get written about are the big ones — Pashupatinath, Muktinath, Manakamana with its cable car and its queues. But if you ride anywhere in the hills for a day you will pass thirty shrines like this one. On saddles, at crossroads, under a particular tree, at the top of a stair nobody built recently. They have no signboard and no schedule and no ticket, and somebody has still been up that morning to leave flowers and light something and sweep the step.

Nobody is doing that for tourists. There are no tourists. It is just maintenance of a relationship that has been going on for a long time, carried out by whoever lives nearest, without anyone deciding to be responsible for it. I find that more impressive than the large temples, which have staff.

North

The road here runs on up towards Dhunche, which is the district headquarters of Rasuwa at about 1,960 metres and the point where the tarmac starts to feel provisional. Beyond it the country goes up into Langtang and then into Tibet, close enough that the border is a day's drive rather than an abstraction.

I did not go up. It was a spring trip, the trees were coming back, the grass on the terraces was that violent new green that only lasts a few weeks, and I spent most of it sitting still — which for me is unusual and was the point. There was a pool at a place we stayed with the hills lined up behind it and I got in and looked at them for a long time and did not do anything productive whatsoever.

Some trips are for covering distance. This one was for stopping, and for a small temple on a ridge with two tired lions and a bell that somebody rings every morning whether or not anyone is listening.