Shangri-La is often used in a context similar to “Garden of Eden,” to represent a paradise hidden from modern man. Khembalung is one of several beyuls ( hidden lands similar to Shangri-La) believed to have been created by Padmasambhava in the 9th century as idyllic, sacred places of refuge for Buddhists during times of strife ( Reinhard, 1978).

But the feeling was only momentary, and soon merged in the deeper sensation, half mystical, half visual, of having reached at last some place that was an end, a finality.In the ancient Tibetan scriptures, the existence of seven such places is mentioned as Nghe-Beyul Khembalung. Conway experienced, as he gazed, a slight tightening of apprehension Mallinson’s misgivings were not, perhaps, to be wholly disregarded. Only to the lamasery did there appear to be any climbable egress at all. The floor of the valley, hazily distant, welcomed the eye with greenness sheltered from winds, and surveyed rather than dominated by the lamasery, it looked to Conway a delightfully favoured place, though if it were inhabited its community must be completely isolated by the lofty and sheerly unscalable ranges on the farther side.

Hardly less an enticement was the downward prospect, for the mountain wall continued to drop, nearly perpendicularly, into a cleft that could only have been the result of some cataclysm in the far past. He wondered if the slightness of the risk combined with its fearfulness might even be found agreeably stimulating. Some day, perhaps, the whole mountain would split, and a half of Karakal’s icy splendour come toppling into the valley. It might well be, Conway thought, the most terrifying mountain-scape in the world, and he imagined the immense stress of snow and glacier against which the rock functioned as a gigantic retaining wall. Beyond that, in a dazzling pyramid, soared the snow-slopes of Karakal. An austere emotion carried the eye upward from milk-blue roofs to the grey rock bastion above, tremendous as the Wetterhorn above Grindelwald.

A group of coloured pavilions clung to the mountainside with none of the grim deliberation of a Rhineland castle, but rather with the chance delicacy of flower-petals impaled upon a crag. It was, indeed, a strange and almost incredible sight. To Conway, seeing it first, it might have been a vision fluttering out of that solitary rhythm in which lack of oxygen had encompassed all his faculties. Ahead, and only a short distance away, lay the lamasery of Shangri-La. Presently the ground levelled, and they stepped out of the mist into clear, sunny air. They were still conversing when a sharp but brief ascent robbed them of breath, inducing in a few paces all their earlier strain.

Shangri la book james hilton