by Ruskin Bond
And so—though I shall assume it was a musk deer—it is hard to put away the thought of yeti. This forested ravine of the upper Suli Gad is comparable in altitude to the cloud forests of eastern Nepal that are thought to shelter “the man-thing of the snows”; so far as I know, no yeti have been reported from west of the Kali Gandaki, but in reference to a creature as rare and wary as the yeti is presumed to be, this may only mean that these northwestern mountains are far less populous, far less explored.
At 10,800 feet, the canyon opens out into high valleys. A herd of the black shaggy oxen known as yaks are moving down across a hillside of cut barley, preceded by a cold thin tinkle of bells; in these mountains, a faint bell is often a first sign of human presence. The lead animals, carrying packs, are decked out in red collars and bright tassels, and soon a man and wife come down the path in full Tibetan dress, the man in blanket, belted cloak, and baggy pants tucked into red wool boots tied around the calf, the woman in striped apron and black cloths.
On a long slope, in buckwheat fields, is the settlement called Murwa, which takes its name from a kind of mountain millet. The Murwa folk are very clean by comparison to the people of Rohagaon, and their stone houses, yards, and fields are well ordered and well kept; they have red dogs and well-fed stock, and sell a few eggs and potatoes to Phu-Tsering. The sunny hillside is protected all around by snow peaks, and down the high wall to the west roars the great waterfall from Phoksumdo Lake, joining the Murwa stream to form the Suli. I am sorry we must march straight up through this restful place in order to reach Phoksumdo Lake before the evening.
In a cold wind at the Murwa stream, we take off boots and pants and wade the current, which is strong and swift, over slick rocks. I hurry in the icy water, for my numb feet find no footing; suddenly I am plunging like a horse, on the brink of a frigid bath, or worse. Moving diagonally upstream, I make it safely after some bad moments and dry myself on a sunny rock, out of the wind.
From Murwa there is a steep climb through scrub juniper and deodar cedar to a ridge at 12,500 feet—the natural dam that holds Phoksumdo Lake among the snow peaks. I am some distance ahead of GS when a man on horseback, crossing the ridge, demands to know my destination. “Shey Gompa,” I declare—the Crystal Monastery. “Shey!” he repeats doubtfully, looking behind him at the peaks to the northwest. He points toward the south and then at me. “Tarakot,” I say, “Dhorpatan.” Nodding, he repeats, “Dhorpatan.” Probably he is going there, and is glad to learn that we have got across Jang La; I neglect to warn him that his pony will not make it.
A boy and girl appear among the cedars. In her basket is a cask of goat cheese, and cheese wrapped in birch bark; she presents me with a bit, and I buy more, and out of the wind, on warm needles in the shelter of evergreens, I eat it up, with half of a big raw radish from Rohagaon.
From the forest comes the sound of bells, and horse hooves dancing on the granite: a man in a clean cloak and new wool boots canters up on a pony with silver trappings. This horseman, too, demands to know my destination, and he, too, frowns to learn that it is Shey. With a slashing movement of his hand across his throat, he indicates the depth of snow, then rides off in a jangle of bright bells.
Clouds loom on the mountains to the south; the cold wind nags me. Soon GS comes, having had the same report: he fears we may have trouble getting in. I nod, though what concerns me more is getting out. The snow already fallen at Kang La will not melt this late in the year; it can only deepen. To be trapped by blizzard on the far side of the Kang would be quite serious, since the food that remains cannot last more than two months.
Northward, the ridge opens out in a pine pasture at 12,000 feet where a herd of yaks, like so many black rocks, lies grouped in the cold sun. The yak has been domesticated from wild herds that still occur in remote parts of Tibet. The female yak is called the bri, and her bushy-tailed, short-faced calf looks like a huge toy. Among these yaks are some yak-cattle hybrids, known as dzo. On the shaggy coats, the long hairs shine, stirred by the wind; one chews slow cud. Manure smell and finch twitterings, blue sky and snow: facing the cold wind from the south, the great animals gaze down across the cliff to where the Bauli Gad, descending from Phoksumdo, explodes from its narrow chute into two, then three broad waterfalls that gather again at the Murwa stream below.
In the granite and evergreen beyond the yaks, a lake of turquoise glitters beneath the snow peaks of the Kanjirobas. I walk down slowly through the silent pines.
A geologist would say that Phoksumdo Tal, three miles long, a half-mile wide, and reputed to be near a half-mile in depth, was formed when an earthquake collapsed the mountain on this side of the high valley, blocking the river that comes down from the Kanjirobas at what is now the north end of the lake. But local tradition has a different explanation:
When B’on was the great religion of the Land of B’od, of which this region was once part, there was a village where this lake now lies. In the eighth century, the great Buddhist saint Padmasambhava, the “Lotus-Born,” came to Phoksumdo with the intent of vanquishing the mountain demons. To this end, he persecuted a B’on demoness who, fleeing his wrath, gave these villagers a priceless turquoise, making them promise not to reveal that she had passed this way. But Padmasambhava caused the turquoise to be turned to dung, upon which the villagers, concluding that the demoness had tricked them, betrayed her whereabouts. In revenge, she wreaked upon them a disastrous flood that drowned the village beneath turquoise waters.*5
Be that as it may, B’on has persisted in this region, and there is a B’on monastery near Ring-mo, a village at the eastern end of the lake that cannot differ much from the eighth-century village that vanished in the deluge. From a distance, Ring-mo looks like a fortress in a tale, for the walls are built up like battlements by winter brushwood stacked on the flat roofs. Sky-blue and cloud-white prayer flags fly like banners in the windy light, and a falling sun, pierced by the peaks, casts heraldic rays.
From the pine forest comes a woodcutter in boots and homespun, uttering barbaric cries that go unanswered in the autumn air. I follow this moonstruck figure down the path toward two white entrance stupas. The stupas, ringed and decorated in warm red, are fat and lopsided, like immense gingerbread houses, and it seems fitting that, nearby, a cave beneath a giant boulder is walled up with stones in which a small crooked wooden door has been inset. All about are red-gold shrubs—barberry, gooseberry, and rose—and a glistening of the last silver wisps of summer’s caper blossoms. Beyond the stupas, protecting the walled town like a moat, is the Bauli torrent that falls down from Phoksumdo. A bridge with flags crosses the torrent where it narrows to enter its mile-long chute down around the west end of the ridge to the great falls, and just above this bridge, in the roaring waters, is a boulder that was somehow reached by a believer, and OM MANI PADME HUM has been carved there in mid-torrent, as if to hurl this mantra down out of the Himalaya to the benighted millions on the Ganges Plain.
Across the bridge, a third entrance stupa is built in an arch over the path up to the town. There are snowdrifts under the north walls, and three immense black yaks stand there immobile. Beyond are small patches of barley and buckwheat, and potato, which came to these mountains in the nineteenth century. A boy leads a team of dzo through the potatoes, hauling a crude harrow with wood blade; other children ride the harrow handles to keep the blade sunk in the flinty soil. In their wake, an old man, kneeling, scavenges stray potatoes with a hand hoe, though barely fit to manage his own body. Seeing a stranger, he offers a broken yellow smile by way of apology for his old age.
On the village street stands a tall figure in a red cloak flung over a sheepskin vest that is black with grime; a lavender turban with tassles and once-colorful wool boots deck the extremities of this bandit, who hails me in a wolfish, leering way. Now pretty children run out, smiling, and a silent mastiff runs out, too, only to suffer a rude yank from its chain; its lean jowls curl in a canine smile of
pain. Everyone in Ring-mo smiles, and keeping a sharp eye out, I smile, too.
The rough brown buildings have wood doors and arches, and filthy Mongol faces, snot-nosed, wild, laugh at the strangers from the crooked windows. Strange, heavy thumpings come from an immense stone mortar: two girls strike the grain in turn with wood pestles four feet long, keeping time with rhythmic soft sweet grunts, and two carpenters hew rude pine planks with crude adzes. Among the raffish folk of Ring-mo, dirt is worn like skin, and the children’s faces are round crusts of sores and grime. Both sexes braid their long hair into pigtails and wear necklaces of beads and dark bits of turquoise, silver, and bone, as well as small amulet packets of old string around their necks. The dress here is essentially Tibetan—cloaks, apron belts, and red-striped woolen boots with yak-twine soles.
Through Jangbu, we question everyone about Kang La and Shey Gompa, as the crowd gives off that heartening smell of uncultivated peoples the world over, an earthy but not sour smell of sweat and fire smoke and the oil of human leather. Goats, a few sheep, come and go. Both men and women roll sheep wool on hand spindles, saying that blizzards have closed Kang La for the winter. On the roofs, culled buckwheat stacked for winter fodder has a bronze shine in the dying sun, and against a sunset wall, out of the wind, an old woman with clean hair turns her old prayer wheel, humming, humming.
OCTOBER 23
The Tamangs will turn back at Ring-mo, for they are not equipped for the Kang Pass. A goat has been found, and some wood flagons of chang, to celebrate our weeks together, and they butcher this billy goat with glee. The Sherpas don’t participate in the taking of its life, but they will be happy to help eat it.
In early afternoon, bearing away the goat’s head and forequarters and five bellyfuls of chang, Pirim and his companions cross the torrent and go chattering uphill, past the cake-colored stupas, to vanish among the sunny pines; freed of their loads, they fairly dance. And though I smile to see the way they go, I feel a sinking of the spirit.
Tukten is our sole remaining porter, and he will be paid henceforth as a Sherpa, as he is much too valuable to lose. The decision to keep Tukten on was mine, as despite his ambiguous reputation I find him the most intelligent and helpful of our men; also, I feel that in some way he brings me luck. He will go with me in case I depart from Shey before GS, for Dawa and Gyaltsen speak no English whatsoever, and GS will need both Jang-bu and Phu-Tsering.
A wind out of the north is cold, but behind the high stone walls of the stock compound where the tents are pitched, the sun is warm. Despite all the reports of heavy snow, we have decided against using yaks, which can plow through new snow up to their bellies but are soon immobilized by ice and crusts. And so Jang-bu is organizing a new lot of porters, who are demanding twenty-five rupees a day. Already these noisy fellows lay the groundwork for malingering at the Kang Pass—“What will you pay us if we must turn back?” They say two days are needed to prepare food and patch their clothes, and one man has been all day in our compound, sewing hard gray wool from a spindle whorl (much like that used by the Hopi) into his calf-high woolen boots, and meditating on our gear the while.
All but the porters have lost interest in us quickly, now that it’s clear just how and where the money will be made. In costumes, attitudes, and degree of filth, these Ring-mos cannot have changed much from the eighth-century inhabitants who betrayed the demoness when her turquoise turned to dung. At this season, they live mostly on potatoes, ignoring the autumn bounty of wild fruit that is everywhere around the village. Down by the stream, I persuade two girls to try the gooseberries that grow there. The children are suspicious, tantalized, astonished; in their delight, they stare at each other, then begin to laugh.
While GS climbs the mountainside in search of bharal, I explore the stupas and the town. Even to my untutored eye, the ancient frescoes on the stupa walls, and the ceiling mandalas especially, seem intricate and well designed, for the culture of this region was formerly more vital than it is today. The dominant colors are red ochers, blues, and whites, but yellow and green are also used for certain Buddha aspects and manifestations. The confusion of Buddha figures is compounded here because B’on still prevails, despite the eighth-century inundation of the B’on villagers beneath Phoksumdo. At Ring-mo, Sakyamuni is called Shen-rap, and the faithful swing their prayer wheels left about and circumambulate prayer walls and stupas with left shoulder to the monument instead of right. The swastikas here in the main stupa are reversed, and the prayer stones bear such B’on inscriptions as OM MATRI MUYE SA LE DU (“In clarity unite”),*6 said to derive from the language of Sh’ang Sh’ung, the mysterious kingdom of western Tibet where, according to B’on-pos, the great B’on teachings usurped by the Buddhists first appeared.
“There is no word for Buddhism in Tibet. Tibetans are either chos-pa (followers of chos—the Dharma or Universal Law as revealed by Buddha) or b’on-pos (followers of B’on).”*7 Yet in practice, B’on has adapted itself so thoroughly to Buddhism, and vice versa, that in their superficial forms they are much the same.
At Ring-mo, OM MANI PADME HUM is carved on the river rock, and a blue Buddha manifestation on the frescoes represents the great scourge of B’on, Padmasambhava; incidental decorations inside and outside the stupas are common symbols of Tibetan Buddhism, such as the conchshell trumpet of victory, the intertwined snakes, the four-way yin-yang, and the four- and eight-petaled lotuses. B’on has degenerated into a regressive sect of Buddhism and is so regarded, here at least, by its own practitioners. As one of the townsmen says, a little sheepishly, “I am Buddhist, but I walk around the prayer stones the wrong way.”
The path to the B’on monastery crosses the torrent, traversing potato fields and pasture to the evergreen forest by Phoksumdo Lake. Ring-mo is a quarter mile or more south of the lake, yet the inhabitants use its Tibetan name, Tsho-wa, or “Lakeside”—could this have been the name of the drowned village? Except for the monastery, there is no habitation near the water, and no boat has ever sailed its surface; its translucent blue-green color must reflect a white sand on the lake floor far below. There are no aquatic animals, and even algae find no place in this brilliant water rimmed around by stone. Truly it is a lake without impurities, like the dust-free mirror of Buddhist symbolism which, “although it offers an endless procession of pictures, is uniform and colorless, unchanging, yet not apart from the pictures it reveals.”
The sacred eyes on small stupas by the water’s edge follow me along a path of lakeside birch. On the far side of this wood stand the monastery buildings, backed up against the cliffs of the lake’s east wall. Seventeen years ago, there were two B’on lamas and twelve monks at Ring-mo, but now it is locked shut, all but abandoned. An ancient caretaker, plagued by goiter, makes wood water casks and prayer stones of poor quality; his old wife squats in a potato patch so small that she can hoe all comers of it from the center. There is a B’on lama up at Pung-mo—they point toward the western peak—but they have no idea when he will come. I go away disappointed. Two days north of Shey is the monastery of Samling, which is said to be the seat of B’on in these far mountains. But if we are to believe these people, our chance of reaching Shey is very small.
OCTOBER 24
A cold wind out of the north. I wash my head. To reduce the drain on our food supplies, Tukten and Gyaltsen leave today for Jumla, where they will obtain rice and sugar and perhaps mail; if all goes well, they will join us at Shey about November 10.
Yesterday I wrote letters to send off with Tukten, and the writing depressed me, stirring up longings, and worries about the children, and bringing me down from the mountain high.
The effort to find ordinary words for what I have seen in this extraordinary time seems to have dissipated a kind of power, and the loss of intensity is accompanied by loss of confidence and inner balance; my legs feel stiff and heavy, and I dread the narrow ledge around the west walls of Phoksumdo that we must follow for two miles or more tomorrow.
This ledge is visible from Ring-mo, and even GS was taken aback by the first sight of it. “That’s not something you’d want to do every day,” he said. I also dread the snow in the high passes that might trap us in the treeless waste beyond. These fears just worsen matters, but there’s no sense pretending they are not there. It is one thing to climb remote mountains if one has done it all one’s life; it is quite another to begin in middle age. Not that forty-six is too old to start, but I doubt that I shall ever welcome ice faces and narrow ledges, treacherous log bridges across torrents, the threat of wind and blizzard; in high mountains, there is small room for mistake.
Why is death so much on my mind when I do not feel I am afraid of it?—the dying, yes, especially in cold (hence the oppression brought by this north wind down off the glaciers, and by the cold choppiness on the cold lake), but not the state itself. And yet I cling—to what? What am I to make of these waves of timidity, this hope of continuity, when at other moments I feel free as the bharal on those heights, ready for wolf and snow and leopard alike? I must be careful, that is true, for I have young children with no mother, and much work to finish; but these aren’t honest reasons, past a point. Between clinging and letting go, I feel a terrific struggle. This is a fine chance to let go, to “win my life by losing it,” which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but non-attachment.
If given the chance to turn back, I would not take it. Therefore the decision to go ahead is my own responsibility, to be accepted with a whole heart. Or so I write here, in faint hope that the words may give me courage.
I walk down around the ridge to where the torrent falls into the Suli. Beneath evergreens and silver birch, ripples flow along the pale gray rocks, and a wren and a brown dipper come and go where water is pouring into water. The dipper is kin to the North American water ouzel, and the tiny wren is the winter wren of home—the only species of that New World family that has made its way across into Eurasia.