A masked dancer performing during a monastry festival in Leh As you drive into Leh and after the odyssey of a long drive, comes a fairy-tale ending. A fort, a palace and a monastery stand out against the sky, amidst an avenue of poplars. This is Leh. The journey has just begun. As the Buddhists say:`When you are ready, the teacher will appear.'

Above every village, large or small, rise the ubiquitous gompas or Buddhist monasteries, turreting the pristine air to break the articulate silence of the land of Vajrayana, the ‘Vehicle of the Thunderbolt’. Dominating life in these desolate places, built as acts of piety, believing in what are known as the Four Noble Truths, Sakyamuni discovered that man's existence is inseparable from sorrow; the cause of suffering is desire and peace is achieved by extinguishing all desire. And your liberation lies in following the Ashtangiha Marg - the Eight-fold Path.

`Good walls make good neighbours', admonished the poet, but here where there is no habitation you will still find yourself walking into walls. The visitor constantly sees what are little more than dents on the surface of the desert. More real than walls in the mind, these mani-walls too are dedicated to the glory of god. If you look carefully, engraved in Tibetan script is the eternal invocation: Om Mani Padme Hum (Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus). A Village in Leh

The gompa, or more simply the monastery, is placed at the spiritual centre of the Buddhist way of life. Built on a hillock or on a slope above the village these are homes for celibate monks. At the very summit of the gompa and of the religious hierarchy lives the Kinpoche, or the chief Lama of the order. Numberless gompas are scattered over the land. Some of them are:

Spituk Gompa:
Built in the l5th century, the gompa stands on a solitary precipice just eight kilometres from Leh above the village of the same name.

Shey Gompa:
Fourteen kilometres from Leh, Shey was once the ancient capital of Ladakh and it continued to be so after Sengee Namgyal moved out to Leh to build the palace there in the l7th century.

Spituk Gompa Thiksey Gompa:
It lies above the village, right at the end of the road. The newer temple to the right with the new image of Maitreya - sitting in the lotus posture on an upraised throne-was dedicated in 1980 by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.

Hemis Gompa:
Forty kilometres from Leh lies the best known of all the gompas. The fame of its dance-festival, held here every summer, has travelled far and wide. You do not see it till you are almost there, tucked away in a dale in the Zanskar Range. Those devil-dances, the drums, the percussion of cymbals and trumpeting horns give the place a certain mystique. Dedicated to Padmasambhava, it houses a very special treasure, open to the gaze of the public once every eleven years - a rare thangka, not like the ones you normally see, but embroidered with pearls. It is by far the richest and largest of all gompas, founded, we are told, in the 1630s under the benevolent patronage of Sengee Namgyal.