The crowd does not prepare you
You have seen photographs. The masks are enormous, painted faces of wrathful deities, wide-eyed and red-mouthed, worn by monks who have trained for years to move inside them without stumbling. You think you are ready for the visual scale of Hemis. You are not ready for the sound.The courtyard of Hemis Monastery sits inside a fold of mountain in Ladakh, at roughly 3,600 metres, and when the dungchen, the long Tibetan horns, begin, the sound does not travel toward you so much as arrive inside your chest. It is not music in any sense you have been trained to receive. It is pressure. The drums follow, and then the cymbals, and the Cham dancers move out from the temple doors in robes of brocaded silk that cost more than most people in the crowd will earn that month. You are standing in a crowd of pilgrims and tourists and you cannot tell, from the outside, which is which. That confusion is the first thing Hemis teaches you.
