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The festival of Dasain is Nepal's equivalent of Christmas, although it spans 15 days and is defined by copious bloodletting. The October holiday commemorates how the goddess Durga -- a wrathful emanation of Parvati, the otherwise demure wife of the great Lord Shiva -- slew a giant buffalo-demon named Mahisasura. In Kathmandu, the event is recalled with zealous butchery. Tens of thousands of goats, water buffaloes and chickens are ritually killed, their blood spurting onto black stone shrines across the Valley.

Needless to say, this is a very colorful festival -- red predominating -- and tourists rise early for the chance to photograph the slaughter. Most alluring is the annual blessing of the machines, where tools and vehicles of all stripe are doused with sacrificial blood. Mechanics kill chickens, sprinkling fresh blood over their wrenches; Honda scooters, taxis and trucks receive their due as well. A few miles east of where I sit, a light-duty crane hoists a hapless goat toward the cockpit of Karnali, a venerable 757 in the Royal Nepal Airlines fleet. The goat is gently coaxed to bare its throat. With a quick stroke of a khukuri -- the boomerang-shaped blade carried by the Gurkha regiments -- the animal is beheaded. Blood spurts over the jetliner's nose, assuring another year of safe passage.

After two decades of visiting the World's Only Hindu Kingdom, I rarely get up for sacrifices. For one thing, I can hear goats being slaughtered from my bed. For another, I've come to accept the event for what it is: a deeply complicated form of meal preparation. I find it ironic that casual tourists view the Dasain hi-jinks as exotic and macabre; it shows how far most of us have strayed from our own food supply. A century or two ago, if you planned to serve turkey or pork for Christmas, you'd butcher the beast yourself -- and there would be a conspicuous lack of spiritual content to the event. The Nepalese don't eat very much meat (compared with people in China, let alone Wisconsin), but when they do, they like to have some first-hand knowledge of where the animal came from -- and where, by the lights of reincarnation, it might be going.

As gruesome as it may be, the wholesale slaughter that marks Dasain isn't what's on my mind these days. I've been disturbed by a more gradual sacrifice: that of the Kathmandu Valley itself.

During the past 20 years -- and especially since 1987 -- I've watched one of the world's most sacred and exquisite landscapes spiral into a morass of mismanagement and pollution. About 10 years ago, expatriate residents squealed with delight as the first traffic lights were installed by the Bagmati Bridge. Today the locals rev their two-stroke motorcycles through bumper-to-bumper gridlock, Urban Survival particle filters fixed across their faces. The commingling of rickshaw, taxi and bicycle horns used to have a musical, almost celebratory ring. To simulate today's effect, go to Manhattan and spread out a picnic in the middle of Eighth Avenue. The alluring mountain views that remained even two or three years ago -- vistas of the snowy Himalaya glimpsed between hastily erected cement buildings -- have been overwritten with garish billboards hawking whiskey, beer and cigarettes.

Don't get me wrong. There are still a lot of beautiful things to see and do in Kathmandu -- from the golden spires of Pashupati temple to the all-seeing eyes of Buddha staring down from the Swayambhu stupa. The problem is that the distance between them has become a stinging hell-realm of diesel smoke and chaos. I've bitched about it before, but never this way. It seems to me, with this latest visit, that a line of sorts has been crossed. Kathmandu's deterioration, left unchecked, will soon make this once-mythical Valley about as inviting as Akron, Ohio.

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