Norbu

Norbu appears at the very end of the extract and rescues the author from his sense of being stuck. He is a Tibetan scholar who works in Beijing at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in the Institute of Ethnic Literature, and has written academic papers about the Kailash kora for years — without ever having done it himself. He is friendly, enthusiastic and good-humoured: recognising a fellow book-lover, he proposes they team up as 'two academics who have escaped from the library.' He is refreshingly frank about his own limitations — overweight, out of breath at altitude, not really a practising Buddhist, and with no intention of prostrating himself round the mountain, laughing that his 'tummy was too big'. …