Mount Kailash has never been climbed, and the four faiths that hold it sacred intend to keep it that way. Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and followers of the ancient Bon religion all treat this 6,638-meter peak as the axis of the world. It stands alone on the western Tibetan Plateau, in the Gangdise range, well apart from the Himalayas. Its shape is a black-and-white pyramid of banded rock and permanent snow, visible for miles across the barren Barkha plain. Four of Asia's great rivers rise within about 60 kilometers of its base: the Indus, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra, and the Karnali that feeds the Ganges. Each one runs off toward a different quarter of the subcontinent. When Reinhold Messner was offered a permit to climb in the 1980s he declined, saying an ascent would conquer something in people's souls, and China has since banned climbing outright.
Pilgrims come to walk around the mountain rather than to climb it. The circuit, called the kora, runs 52 kilometers and is usually walked over three days. It crosses the Drolma-La pass at 5,630 meters, where thousands of prayer flags snap in the wind and the air holds little more than half the oxygen of sea level. The most devout make the entire loop through full-body prostrations, measuring the trail out with their own length, a journey that can take weeks. Walking the circuit shows you the mountain from every side, and it looks different at each hour: a dark silhouette at dawn, wrapped in cloud through the afternoon, then sharply lit under the deep blue sky of high altitude. Two lakes sit near the trailhead, the round freshwater Manasarovar and the darker, crescent-shaped Rakshastal, cast in tradition as sun and moon. Reaching the mountain still takes patience. Most travelers spend several days acclimatizing, and the far west of Tibet can be entered only on a permit that the authorities may suspend at short notice.