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“The process is a ruthless one,” says one scholar of the path of the Pushapati sects. “It requires the individual to abandon all these things which men most cherish, and to strip, layer by layer, the veils of ignorance, conditioning, and delusions which separate his awareness from the immortal soul. True insight and inspiration, a new awakened sense of magic and wonder is the start of the journey to the Eternal. Without this, it is not possible to escape from the world of relativity.”

Pre-dawn, Aristu and I entered the temple grounds, still a kilometer from the temple, but mashed by the crowd. Strands of tiny, bright, multicolored lights (Christmas lights, I would have called them) flashed along the fences and tree tops. For an hour we shuffled forward in the dark like some massive zombie army. As we neared the main temple, Aristu flashed his badge once more. We hopped a few cords, left the line to the temple, and found ourselves for the first time in open space.

As dawn broke, we crossed the bridge over the Bagmati River. The ghats leading down to the water’s edge blazed with cremation pyres. So many people receive their last rites here that the river is clogged with the silt of ashes. All week I watched workmen, knee deep, shoveling out the accumulated sludge, trying to get a bit of a flow back into the river. Prolonged drought had turned the Bagmati into a fetid trickle that dribbles through the city. It picks up more sewage and trash than it does water. You know when you are near a bridge in Kathmandu—it stinks. You have to hold a scarf or a sleeve to cover your face in order to breathe.

On the far bank of Bagmati, we climbed the stairs up the hill to a viewpoint overlooking the golden-roofed pagoda in which the four-faced lingam rests. Around the shrines and stairways the holy men have made their camps. Tiny, smoky fires glowed orange before the makeshift altars of talismans and icons. The Trisulas (iron tridents), the sacred weapon of Siva, were planted firmly in the ground around the camps. The men cupped their hands and sucked the sweet smoke from their chillims (chillum pipes), chanting and chatting with their comrades and curious onlookers. A haze of ganja hung blue in the morning air. Teenage boys seemed keen to join in the sacred act, though Aristu for one said he had no intention of getting high.

I was riveted by the human artwork—how each Sadhu marks himself with ash and paint. Vermillion and bright yellow triangles on the forehead, or stark white lines. Some have let their hair grow long and wild. Mustaches twirled at the ends or drooping over the mouth like a walrus. Dreadlocks coiled round and round the heads of others like a massive frizzy turban. They remind me of prehistoric cave painting come to life. Indeed these men seem like something out of time—inhabitants not of the twenty-first century, but of Shiva’s timeless realm.

Aristu ushered me through a door in a walled compound next to the stairs. Past a series of shrines we found the courtyard where more than a hundred more Sadhus gathered. My young guide pointed out to me the various types. Among the saffron robed Sadhus, we spotted ascetics who sat near naked, but for a loincloth, their bodies covered in ash, their hair wound around their heads in matted dreadlocks. Two men wore black robes and black turbans. Aristu told me they were eaters of corpses. He said one of them lived in a hermitage in the cliffs farther up the river. People were afraid of him. So, the more extreme of the Pashupati sects still do exist, I thought. I looked at the man. He had a gray beard, neatly trimmed. His black robe was clean. He sat alone, looking down, with long iron tongs of some kind resting on one shoulder. He appeared thoughtful, self-contained.

In another corner of the compound a naked man stood in the center of the group. His disheveled hair dangled down to his ankles. He wore dozens of strands of prayer beads round his neck that looped down and somewhat covered his genitals. I kept expecting these extreme