There's a trail that runs right around the world, across the continents, through lowlands and highlands. It dips into ravines, traverses ridges, follows hidden valleys. It has always been there. In the modern landscape it goes underground or into the past. Some people never see it at all - but for much of the world's population it is the only road there is.
From force of habit, I recognise it the moment it appears. There is a roadhead, a few ramshackle stalls, the smell of transition; the truck will go no further; the trail ahead is dusty, rocky, caked with mud. Trees have a beaten look, and if there is water there's too much of it, a glacial river - or else it's polluted, sickly to the eye.
The start of the trail is not inviting. Take a deep breath of the faecal air that invests all roadheads, and embark. It improves with distance. The trail runs steeply up and downhill, winds along the rim of river and ravine, through groves of willow, rhododendron, birch; it attracts as it grows wilder. At times it cuts through paddy-fields or plots of barley-stubble, stepping along spaded ridges of stony clay; it skirts improbable corners of rye or maize, ragged but ripening.
The steepest sections of the trail are paved with stones that form rough steps, set to the rhythm of walking. Shallow drains cut across the path, funnelling in and out of rank undergrowth at odd but precise angles. The dust in the air has a consistency that I can smell, on reflection, and almost taste; if you study it closely it contains tiny shreds of half-digested grass or hay, where beasts of burden have convoyed endlessly and the dust is the product of hooves on impoverished soil mixed with the slow, tedious, finely stranded dung.
It's curious how often the leisure traveller finds himself on the universal trail, which had no previous tradition other than grinding work and occasional pilgrimage. (The two go hand in hand, as if the Tourism strips the visual asset without compensation. When the Greek Islands crashed into mass-tourism 40 years ago, the resorts, restaurants, villas, tavernas, were developed and run by mainlanders, not islanders. It wasn't the local peasantry who profited from the Costa del Sol, nor the Algarve. At home - if you really need to ask - you could check the ownership of the ferries that submerge the Aran Islands in day-trippers. The ticket price isn't spent, or banked, on Inishmore.
Porters scrape a living from the universal trail. Despite its hardship, the system spreads the profits of transport along a chain of communities handling the goods in turn. Where roads have been bulldozed in Nepal, the goods are lorried from roadhead to roadhead, depositing a sad, grey dust on the dying villages in between. People gravitate to the ends of the road seeking work, and these become choked cities such as Kathmandu and Pokhara. There are different kinds and classes of porters, particularly in mountain areas. Often collectively called sherpas in Nepal, many don't belong to the Sherpa population at all. Sherpas are seldom porters in the servile sense of the word. They are mountaineers in their own right, guiding expeditions and often out-performing those they work for.
Speed and frequency records on Everest belong to Sherpas. Some have been on top as many as 10 times; Appa Sherpa has summited 11 times. This year, Babu Chhiri Sherpa (34) raced from Base Camp to the summit of the world in 16 hours, 56 minutes, in a deliberate attempt to set an enduring record. How long it will last is another matter, but when it's broken, it will be by another Sherpa. The locals hold a less auspicious record too: 46 deaths on Everest...
The people of the lower mountains, the Rai in particular, also work at altitude, but they seldom attain the same status as the Sherpas, who control the business and keep it to their own kin. Very like Co Donegal men and tunnel-work in England.
Groups lower in the pecking order often complain about the arrogance and racism of the Sherpas. They have a thriving culture and economy high in the Nepali Himalaya, with Dingboche - a potato village at about 14,000 feet - being the highest year-round habitation in the world.
Sherpas migrated in small numbers from the Tibetan uplands as recently as 400 years ago. Sher-pa means "man from the east" in their Tibetan dialect. In a bizarre coincidence, this marginal community first acquired the potato in 1847 - the year Ireland lost it in the Famine. The population expanded immediately with the stimulus, just as the Irish had previously done. The Sherpas also had the salt trade and a yak economy to sustain them and they were spiritually nourished by monastic centres of Buddhist teaching. Their social laws remind one in ways of the Brehon laws - in their liberalism towards women and marriage, for example.
They have grown wealthy on mountaineering, especially since the ascent of Everest in 1953. Edmund Hillary, over the years, has concentrated nobly on education and health in the Solu Khumbu area. As a result, international funding is often directed at the Sherpas, rather than the bulk of the Nepali population without a public mountain to define them.
Sadly, the true porter is a lowly creature. Until recently, he or she went barefoot, carrying an enormous load in a basket slung on the back from a tump-line around the forehead. Today, the slip-on rubber sandal gripped by the big toe is worn everywhere: in dust and mud and sometimes snow.
The wicker basket, once familiar in Ireland as a "creel", is tapered at the base to hug the small of the back, little comfort when it contains up to 50kg of grain, rice or lentils - or paraffin that leaks and lacerates the skin.
All along the trail, there are rocks and low walls shaped so that a porter can stand and rest his load without lowering and lifting it again. The same facilities fringed our own old byways, still recognisable in landscapes such as the Burren. Some porters use a sturdy stick with a stout T-piece, like a shillelagh or a shooting-stick, which is wedged under the basket to give a rest when there's no other support.
Trekking groups and expeditions employ convoys of porters. It's a confusing issue. Those who are serious walkers at home assume they will carry their own load on the trail: they worry about their fitness and the effect of the weight at altitude. When they are advised to carry as little as possible - a sweater, a camera, a water-bottle at most - they feel relief, mixed with anxiety for the porters. They are told that portering is an industry in mountain economies and that the work is eagerly sought.
The anxiety quite properly persists, especially when a well-fed trekker quits an overnight camp in a T-shirt and shorts and outstrips a caravan of bowed hauliers.
Mountain tourism is rife with agents. The porters are the last link in the profit chain, and the most exploited. In Nepal, there's been a government-appointed minimum wage for portering for years, but it's rarely earned by the porter, who may have been subcontracted several times before a basket hits his back.
The trekker pays the agent an average of $50 a day, often more, for a full trekking service, including transport, tents, food, haulage and permits, but many porters are lucky to get two or three dollars' worth of rupees for a day's hard labour. Some travellers tip their porters as generously as possible to redress the balance - paying twice for the service. This lets the agent off the hook and perpetuates the cycle. There are agencies, though, who do not exploit their staff; visitors who don't want a cheap holiday on the backs of the poor will seek them out before taking to the universal trail.
Then there are the porters to the building trade. Galvanised tin roofs - what used to be called corrugated iron in the Irish countryside - are spreading throughout the Himalayas. Powerful porters carry sheets of tin on their backs all day, like beetles trotting under multiple shells. Seen from the hills, Namche Bazar, the Sherpa capital at 13,000 feet, is a glare of tin roofs on bare ground, looking more like a prisoner-of-war camp than a cultural community. While the tin may resist the rains until it rusts, it's as noisy as the inside of a kettle-drum; in summer it grills the house and in winter it huffs away the heat. When the Irish farmhouse turned to the tin roof decades ago, many retained the old thatch underneath.
Porters carry bales of joists and rafters uphill for days on end. The load juts forward in front of the head, and there is a line tied to the very front which can be tugged to shift the balance for a change of posture, like a puppet adjusting itself. Some porters carry steel girders slung sideways across the shoulders, to a width of eight or 10 feet. It takes skill to cross a narrow bridge over a torrent, or thread a way through trees. These long-haul labourers often carry a double-load for double-pay, and can earn $10 or $12 a day for a short working life.
Teee-teee-tea-tea-tea! Encounters by the trail have a theatrical vigour; the Himalayan grandma with creased cheeks and silver hair, in her full-length Gurung gown, announces her tea shop at the top of her voice to a gaggle of trekkers, just as she might wheedle a bunch of chickens home: CHUCK-chuck-chuck-chuck-chuck!
Old Gurkha soldiers (retired) wait patiently for the monthly pension from the British-army bagman. On the trail above Landdrung I met the same old man twice, at an interval of several years, leather-brown cheeks and white moustache, clean white shirt and a waistcoat, the bundled summer loincloth, gnarled legs and arthritic knees. He sat outside his daughter's house all day on a chair - like an old Connemara man who had given years in Boston (except for the loincloth!), engaging passers-by in chat about the wide world. It amused him to reveal slowly the extent of his experience, to watch the effect on his listeners who might have taken him for a simple-minded rustic until he trapped them on the tactics of some old military campaign. I knew him from a previous encounter; he didn't remember me. How could he be expected to recall individuals who passed along the highway in the middle hills of the world- since we were going round in circles and he had long since arrived?
I met another old soldier, accompanying a bony buffalo, matching each other as the old of domestic species do. By a quirk in army arrangements, this Gurkha had briefly been in Belfast, long ago. He had nothing whatsoever to say about the place- except a shrug and a grin. Maybe the shrug was the answer, and the grin a courtesy.