AMARNATH CAVE, Kashmir — Shouting "Hail Hail Shiva!" thousands of Hindu pilgrims crowded two narrow dirt tracks high in the Himalayan mountains of the disputed territory of Kashmir.
Barefoot, world-renouncing Hindu monks, naked to the waist and wrapped in orange cloth below, came walking, carrying tridents. Porters with legs like iron carried elderly women and corpulent businessmen in lawn chairs lashed to tree limbs. Women in pink, yellow and red saris moved past walls of granite, towering jade pines and emerald streams. Some carried infants; others held a husband's hand.
Over a month, more than 100,000 Hindu pilgrims will hike at least 19 miles, sleep in freezing temperatures above 10,000 feet and brave attacks from Muslim militants.
Their trek is all for a hurried glimpse of an ice stalagmite that forms each year on a wall of a remote cave here. The nine-foot-tall ice sheet, shaped like a phallus, is considered to be the symbol of Lord Shiva, one of Hinduism's three most revered gods.
Even though the pilgrimage is purely religious, it has not escaped the conflict in this battered territory. The threat of attacks by Muslim separatists who are fighting for an independent Kashmir has turned this once obscure pilgrimage into one of the most closely watched rites in ritual-filled India.
In the past two years, Muslim militants have killed more than 40 Hindu pilgrims in attacks on the procession. This year, the Indian government has deployed thousands of policemen and soldiers to protect them.
[On July 30, a pilgrim and taxi driver were killed when a bomb exploded beneath their car as they drove through the town of Lazbal, about 40 miles south of the cave, the police said. Several other people were wounded.]
Of more than 3,000 pilgrims who set out on the main path to the holy cave one day in late July, K. K. Srivastava attracted by far the most stares. With jet black shoulder-length hair and a thick beard, he wore the bright saffron robe and turban of a Hindu monk, or ascetic. Two of his neighbors from New Delhi, a 12-year-old boy and a middle-aged man, accompanied him.
Steadying himself with a cane and a walking stick, he moved up the dirt track on his knees. His legs, severed at the calves in a 1993 train accident, are two feet long. Although he is 28, when standing upright, he is as tall as an eight-year-old boy. With each stride, he advanced six inches.
"This is a religious walk," he said, as men on ponies passed him. "It should be walked." It was the fourth time he was climbing the traditional 36-mile route on his knees.
For at least 200 years, the annual pilgrimage, known as the Amarnath Yatra, was a weeklong pageant that attracted no more than a few thousand people, many of them "Sadhus," or Hindu ascetics like Mr. Srivastava. It began when a Muslim shepherd discovered the peculiar ice formation in the cave in the late 1700's. A Hindu priest visited the cave and declared it Amarnath, the mythical home of Lord Shiva.
By the late 1980's, pilgrimage season had grown to a month, and the number of participants had reached about 40,000. Even after Muslim separatists started an armed insurrection in Kashmir in 1989, the pilgrimage continued to grow.
By 1996, at least 160,000 people were visiting the cave shrine each pilgrimage season, which runs from mid-July to mid-August. Two years of Muslim attacks may have dissuaded some pilgrims this year; 100,000 people are expected to attend.
Braving the Himalayas also poses dangers. More than 100 pilgrims died in a sudden storm in 1996. Some pilgrims and porters die each year when they slip off narrow paths and hurtle into valleys below.
Still, they come. Rajesh Prabhakar, a 44-year-old real estate broker from New Delhi, represented the fastest-growing new type of participants. Mr. Prabhakar and a half dozen friends from New Delhi took a newer, shorter route to the cave.
Approaching the holy site from the north, the new 19-mile trail allows pilgrims to hike to the cave and back in a single day. The traditional route is 36 miles and involves spending two nights camped in the cold.
Middle-class professionals like those in Mr. Prabhakar's group — three real estate brokers, a deed writer, an optician and a food merchant — can fly into Kashmir and complete the pilgrimage in three days. For ascetics and impoverished Indians who take the train and the traditional path, the journey lasts one to two weeks.
Dressed in khakis, silver running shoes and a black sports headband, Mr. Prabhakar looked like a power-walker as he began the hike. Striding purposefully forward, the father of three spoke earnestly about religion's ability to get humans to do things they never thought possible.
"Do you see these people walk in the cities?" he asked, gesturing to the soft-bellied middle-class pilgrims surrounding him. "They don't even walk one or two kilometers. Look at their bodies."
But he was convinced that every last one would complete the arduous climb. "The divine spirit will take hold," he predicted. "People will feel, Walk! Walk!"
A mile and a half into the climb, Mr. Prabhakar got onto a pony.
The presence of Mr. Prabhakar and others like him reflects the growth of the Indian middle class, according to longtime pilgrims and organizers. The real estate agent, whose brother is a computer programmer in Sunnyvale, Calif., has disposable income and a desire to explore his faith. But like the other middle-class Indians here, he has not turned away from India's long tradition of religious pilgrimages and spiritual discovery.
For the Indian government, the pilgrimage represents a political statement. The cave sits in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, the divided territory with a Muslim majority, which brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war this spring. Indian officials say militants armed and trained in Pakistan are carrying out the attacks on the pilgrimage and vow to ensure that it will continue.
At half-mile intervals, heavily armed troops stood guard along the hundred-mile stretch of road where buses ferry pilgrims to mountain trails. Banners declaring, "Jammu and Kashmir Police at your service," hang from trees.
Government officials declined to give exact figures, but Indian media report that an additional 15,000 police and soldiers had been deployed to guard the pilgrims. All Kashmiri porters used by pilgrims are pre-screened and issued identity cards. Roads are repeatedly swept for land mines. All pilgrims and Kashmiris using the traditional route pass through a metal detector and are frisked and screened.
The huge security presence has prompted complaints from Kashmiris, who have accused Indian security forces of repeatedly carrying out executions, abductions and other human rights abuses in the state.
Kashmiri hotel owners and porters said they still supported independence, but had grown weary of bloodshed after 13 years of conflict and more than 35,000 deaths. The heavy-handed tactics of both India and Pakistan have soured their views of both countries, they said.
"With a new country I will be very happy," said Said Mohammad, a 35- year-old porter.
But the biggest source of visible tension between Hindu pilgrims and Kashmiri porters, nearly all of whom were Muslims, was not politics but pay rates. Foreign tourism collapsed here after 1995, when five Western hikers, including one American, were kidnapped and killed by militants. Desperate Kashmiris hoping for work or commerce swarm the pilgrimage, creating pony jams. Porters privately complained that the pilgrims this year were younger and less generous than in the past.
The remote valley that holds the cave has the feel of a state fair, with hundreds of Kashmiri traders selling postcards, souvenirs, fruit juice and soda to thousands of arriving Hindus. After crossing a small snowfield, arriving pilgrims took a ritual bath in a pristine stream and put on fresh clothes. They then waited for two hours in a long line that snaked up a set of stairs leading to the cave.
Hailing Shiva and ringing ceremonial bells, they took a final few steps, pressed themselves against an iron railing and looked at the cave wall. The towering, nine-foot ice form had apparently melted. It was only one foot tall.
Some pilgrims, it must be said, were disappointed with the size. Others lamented that they were forced to leave after only seconds, saying the police had pulled them away before they could confess sins and make requests of Lord Shiva.
Akansha Shukla, a 12-year-old girl, made her appeals. "I want to be a pilot," she said. "I won't tell you the rest."
Mr. Srivastava, the ascetic, said he would ask Shiva, the Hindu creator and destroyer of life, to limit suffering in the world.
"I ask Lord Shiva," he said, "that, if he gives birth to people, he take care of them."