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One of my habits when I visit a new town is to try to capture its spirit. Buses usually serve this purpose well: they follow the main streets and stop just long enough to let me capture the atmosphere of a neighbourhood, so that by the end of the day the sum of these holistic images allows me to form a reasonable first impression.

I was eager to do the same in Kathmandu. The only problem was it did not offer any public transport. Although the tight finances of the City Hall might have explained that absence to a certain extent, the narrowness of the great majority of the streets was more to blame. It would have been impossible for buses to circulate around the town. The introduction of motorised rickshaws had been an astute remedy to this situation, as their size allowed them to drive down almost any street, but using them to discover the town would have proved too ruinous for my budget. Thankfully, Kathmandu had an alternative: a hill on the outskirts of the town, which gave a panoramic view of the valley.

To get there I had to reach the edge of the capital by rickshaw, until I arrived right to the foot of the hill. A small circus was performing there: musicians were playing lively music with flutes and drums while three monkeys were jumping from one corner of the small square to another, playing tricks. I watched for a few minutes as the monkeys took some bright-coloured powder in large pots and tried to apply it to the faces of the half-reluctant bystanders. Then I began my ascent.

The slope was quite steep, but the ascent was made easier by steps dug out of the rock, though the number of steps reminded me, with unusual cruelty, of my recent past as a citizen of a flat city. The vantage point was the main tower of a crumbled fortress made of enormous carved stones. A group of people – foreigners and Nepali alike – was already standing on it, admiring the view with binoculars.

Mixing legend and facts, ancient chronicles claim that the valley was at one point filled with a lake surrounded by forest-clad hills. It was an earthly paradise of wild flowers, herbs and serpent deities. In fact, there were so many of these snakelike statues on the hills that the lake was called Naghrad – “Home of the Snake gods”. It was a great place of pilgrimage; people came from all over India and China to stay there and pray. Time passed and the lake came to have an even greater reputation one day, when a beautiful lotus appeared on its surface. Seeing it as a sign, aspiring Buddhas hurried to join the flock of pilgrims and meditate on the banks.

The lake seemed to have been a very blessed place, for a while later a light illuminated the lotus from within. The Buddhists around the lake instantly recognised the Self-Existent One, the God Supreme; and a Buddhist saint of China called Manjusri thought of making the valley habitable and settle there. With one blow of his scimitar he cut a deep cleft in the southern hills and most of the waters escaped through it, leaving the river Bagmati to meander its way through the valley. All the snake statues were washed away, except that of Korhat Raja, King of the serpent deities. Temples dedicated to the Self-Existent One and Kohrat Raja were built together with houses, and Kathmandu began to develop…

Centuries later, Kathmandu offered a truly spectacular sight. It was totally enclosed in a circus of steep hills whose continuous, jagged crest was perfectly visible against the horizon. A green belt of rice paddies surrounded the hundreds of low, flat-roofed buildings and the ancient pagodas, while a whitish cloud of dust and pollution hung like a veil of tulle above the constructions. I could just distinguish the sombre red of the age-old temples in the midst of the yellowish, shoddy modern buildings, tinged with the blue and red awnings of the balconies. Together, these buildings formed a compact jumble of shaped stones in the middle of the lush countryside – rocks emerging from the middle of a green sea, eroded by the successive downpours.

           Kathmandu was somewhere between the modern city and a medieval town. Just like its low buildings, its growth seemed to be hindered by an invisible ceiling, which kept the size of the town modest and slowed its progress. The day-to-day survival on this small patch of land must have developed long ago into an art, of which the inhabitants have become past masters. Walking down the sinewy (and sometimes rather sombre) streets, I had been able to feel the energy each of them devoted to the frenetic search for a living. Still, I had felt something else; a certain density of the air, which made this far-off town captivating. The religion, with the numerous shrines and temples it had inspired across the town, contributed to that ambience. But there was another source to that particular atmosphere: the Nepalese Royal Family. Its existence was closely linked to Kathmandu and the country, and to the religion itself. In this Hindu kingdom ─ the last in the world ─ the Royal Family and the religion gave life to the country like two underground rivers. Together, they unified the nation and led it through critical times. It seemed natural to inquire about these two perennial sources to give me a better idea of where I was.

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