Photo by Vijay Kiran.

Haunted by the famed mountain since he was a young monk, Robert Thurman leads a small group of pilgrims overland to Tibet’s Mt. Kailash, the sacred axis mundi of central Asian cosmology. In this excerpt from “Circling the Sacred Mountain: A Spiritual Adventure Through the Himalayas,” the party arrives at its destination. The narrator is Tad Wise.