The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  The various clans of Abors—an Assamese word meaning “one who does not submit”—continued to harass villages under British administration until the Raj resolved to restore its lost prestige by “inflicting such chastisement as will teach these savages to respect its power.” The punitive expeditions included elephant-drawn howitzers, but the British were still no match for the Abor warriors, who ambushed them with volleys of poison arrows. A climactic military campaign in 1862 ended in political victory for the Abor clans. In exchange for annual subsidies of salt, iron, and cloth and the British government’s promise to desist from any further mapping or encroachment into tribal territories, the Adis (as they called themselves) agreed to stop their raids and depredations of Assam’s villages and emerging tea estates. The riddle of the link between the Tsangpo, the Dihang, and the Brahmaputra remained unresolved. Cartographers realized that because of the impenetrable barrier of the hostile tribes, any further progress would have to come from the other side of the Himalayas, in Tibet.

  The Quest for a Waterfall

  DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Tibet itself was a sealed and secret land. Tibet’s ruling powers had become deeply suspicious of British expansionism and had forbidden all but a few well-known merchants from Nepal and Ladakh from entering the country. Hungry for geographical information about the territory beyond its borders, the British Survey of India began training a class of surveyor-spies to work undercover in Tibet disguised as traders and Buddhist pilgrims.14 The first Pundits, as they came to be called, began training in 1863 at the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India offices in Dehra Dun. Ethnic Tibetans from the British-ruled territories of Sikkim and Kumaon, the Pundits (Sanskrit for learned men) learned to use sextants and prismatic compasses and to determine altitudes by measuring the temperature of boiling tea water with a hypsometer. (In order to obtain measurements accurate to within ten feet, the boiling point had to be calculated to 1/100th of a degree.)

  In the manner immortalized in Rudyard Kipling’s classic novel Kim, the Pundits concealed their notes and surveying gear within their Buddhist prayer wheels and used rosaries of one hundred rather than the conventional 108 beads to count off their steps and measure distances (two thousand paces to the mile). Adopting code names by reversing the first and last letters of their names, these explorer-spies set out to secretly map the forbidden frontiers, mountain ranges, lakes, and river systems of Tibet. The Pundits’ first order was to chart the long-debated course of the Tsangpo and, if possible, to follow it through its innermost chasms to the borders with India.

  ONE OF THE MOST INTREPID of the explorer-spies in the employ of the British government was an illiterate Sikkimese named Kinthup, code-named K.P., first dispatched in 1878 as the assistant to a spy named Nem Singh, an amateur Pundit ill-versed in clandestine surveying. Traveling as pilgrims, the two were ordered to follow the Tsangpo downstream from central Tibet. Two hundred miles from their starting point, they reached a small village called Gyala where the Tsangpo was seen to disappear into “a gigantic cleft in the Himalayan wall.” Unable to proceed farther they retraced their steps and returned to Darjeeling.

  Disappointed with Nem Singh’s performance, the officer who commissioned the expedition replaced him with an even less experienced Chinese lama. With Kinthup acting as guide, the two were to proceed as far as possible beyond where Kinthup and Nem Singh had turned back. At the farthest point, the two agents were instructed to insert metal tubes into 500-foot-long logs and, over a prearranged period, throw them into the river at the rate of fifty per day while Captain Henry Harman’s men kept watch at the junction of the Dihang and Brahmaputra. If the logs appeared, Harman would secure incontrovertible evidence that the Tsangpo and the Brahmaputra were one and the same river.15

  Kinthup and the Chinese lama reached Gyala in March of 1881 after a journey of seven months, over the course of which the lama managed to lose all of the expedition funds gambling, and Kinthup was forced to use his own modest resources to buy the lama out of an entanglement “owing to the Lama falling in love with his host’s wife.”The explorers marched for several days below Gyala, ascending and descending “many steep rocks through jungles and obstructions” until they arrived at a small monastery called Pemakochung, deep in the Tsangpo gorge. At this point, towering cliffs barred further progress. After three days of searching unsuccessfully for a route downriver, they retraced their steps and looked for a way around the impenetrable chasm. North of the gorge, near a village called Tongyuk Dzong, the lama left on an errand, telling Kinthup that he would soon return. He failed to reappear, and Kinthup soon learned that the lama had sold him to the local dzongpon, or district administrator, in exchange for a horse and sufficient funds to make it back to his homeland.

  AFTER NINE MONTHS in captivity Kinthup managed to escape. Instead of returning to Darjeeling as might have been expected, he rejoined the Tsangpo River below its innermost gorges in a valiant attempt to complete his mission and close the “missing link.” Crossing back and forth across the lower Tsangpo on ropes of woven bamboo and “almost perishing from hunger and cold,” Kinthup eventually reached a small gompa, or monastery, in Pemako where “fifteen nuns and thirty priests were allowed to live together.” A search party sent by the dzongpon from whom Kinthup had escaped discovered him at Marpung Gompa, but the abbot took pity on him and after ten days of negotiation, bought him for 50 rupees. Kinthup stayed at the gompa for nearly two years, requesting periodic leave to go on religious pilgrimages. During the first of these excursions he descended to the banks of the Tsangpo and, to complete the original goal of the expedition, assembled five hundred marked logs that he concealed in a cave. Two months later, Kinthup requested a second leave to go on pilgrimage to Lhasa, from where he dictated a letter to Captain Harman informing him of the date he would launch the logs into the river: Sir: the Lama who was sent with me sold me to a Jongpen [headman] as a slave and himself fled away with the Government things that were in his charge. On account of which, the journey proved to be a bad one; however I, Kinthup, have prepared the 500 logs according to the order of . . . Captain Harman, and am prepared to throw 5 0 logs per day into the Tsangpo from Bepung in Pemako, from the 5 th to the 15th of the tenth Tibetan month of the year called Chhuluk [the water sheep] of the Tibetan calculation.16

  He sent the letter to Darjeeling with the wife of a fellow Sikkimese whom he had met in the Lhasa bazaar.

  Kinthup returned to the gompa and served the abbot for another nine months before requesting leave to go on pilgrimage to Kundu Dorsempotrang, a sacred mountain in the heart of Pemako and the gateway to its innermost realms. Impressed by Kinthup’s devotion, the abbot reputedly told him, “I am glad to see you visiting the sacred places, so from to-day I have given you leave to go anywhere you like.” Freed from slavery, Kinthup set out to release his cache of five hundred logs. For ten days in a row, he set himself a daily regime of throwing fifty logs into the river, after which he attempted to follow the Tsangpo south into India. Confronting hostile Adi (Abor) warriors, he retraced his steps to Lhasa and continued on from there to Darjeeling, which he reached on November 17, 1884, four years after he had set out with the rogue lama. The letter that he had traveled hundreds of miles to dispatch from Lhasa had never reached its destination, and the man to whom it was addressed, Captain Harman, had died in the interim from frost-bitten lungs after a map-making expedition on the slopes of Kanchenjunga. The marked logs that Kinthup had so painstakingly launched either floated unnoticed into the Bay of Bengal, or had been lost in the depths of the gorge in the Tsangpo’s fearsome rapids. In Darjeeling, Kinthup dictated an account of his journey to the office of the Trigonometrical Survey through an Indian scribe. His oral report was regarded with suspicion until it was noted that the information he provided largely tallied with the accounts of a Mongolian lama, Serap Gyatso, who had supplied the office with details of his residence in Pemako from 1856 to 1868. Combining Kinth
up’s account with the “list of monasteries, sacred places and villages” provided by the Mongolian lama, the Survey Department compiled a sketch map of the course of the lower Tsangpo, furnishing what the deputy surveyor general described as “the first contribution to the geography of that unknown tract.”

  British geographers compared the apparently “genial terrain” of the lower Tsangpo to the vales of Kashmir, and considered it “the probable highway of the future” into Tibet. Even more interesting to the Survey Department was mention in Kinthup’s account of a monumental waterfall deeper in the gorge than he himself had been able to reach. As stated in the report published by the Trigonometrical Branch of the Survey of India in 1889: “Two miles off [from a remote monastery called Pemakochung, the Tsangpo] falls over a cliff called Sinji-Chogyal from a height of about 150 feet. There is a big lake at the foot of the falls where rainbows are always observable.” Years later, a British field officer would write that this description “translated from the oral report of [Kinthup’s] Tibetan travels . . . was responsible for one of the most obsessive wild goose chases of modern times.”17

  FOLLOWING KINTHUP’S RETURN from the Tsangpo gorges, “The Falls of the Sangpo” was placed on the Survey map. One British officer estimated the waterfall “to lie in about 29 degrees 36’ N. latitude and 94 degrees 47’ E. longitude” and commissioned a Tibetan artist, “a native of the place,” to make a drawing of them, which he published in 1895 in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London.

  FALLS OF THE TSANGPO RIVER. (From a Tibetan drawing.)

  Despite the fact that no European had come remotely close to setting eyes on the “spectacular cataract” in the Tsangpo’s innermost gorge, the president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Thomas Hungerford Holdich, wrote that one “can well imagine the wild magnificence where the river rounds the Himalayas on the east. A dense subtropical jungle, rich with every variety of tree fern and bamboo, stretches up the hillsides. . . . Towering above all are the eternal snows and the everlasting silence of the ice-fields. . . . The falls are very sacred, and the bourne of many a devout pilgrimage. Clouds of misty spray rise into the clear atmosphere above them, and it is said that a rainbow ever spans the valley.”18

  IN 1893, THE LURE OF THE IMAGINED WATERFALL prompted another Englishman, Jack Needham, assistant political officer in Sadiya, Assam, to journey into the tribal territories bordering Tibet on the pretext of subduing the Padam Abors, the tribe of “cannibals” who had prevented Kinthup from following the Tsangpo south into British-held territory. In his telegram to Assam’s chief commissioner, Needham requested permission to travel north along the Dihang into the “unknown tract” of lower Pemako.

  While hacking their way through dense jungle toward the Padam village of Damroh, Needham’s rear guard was ambushed by Abors, who had entered the camp pretending to be porters. After killing all but a wounded washerman who had leapt into the river, the half-naked warriors made off with fourteen rifles and crates of reserve ammunition, effectively ending the campaign as well as Needham’s chances for further exploration in the mysterious regions to the north of the Indian-Tibetan frontier.

  It was due in part to the unrelenting savagery of the Assamese hill tribes that the British eventually forced their way into Tibet along the trade route between Darjeeling and Lhasa. By 1903, Lord Curzon, India’s viceroy, had become increasingly concerned about Russian influence in Tibet and central Asia and, in a culminating gambit of what Rudyard Kipling called the Great Game, launched a full-scale military expedition replete with a caravan of camels, yaks, and mules, led by the illustrious Sir Francis Younghusband, who later planned and organized the first of several British attempts to climb Mount Everest.19

  Besides forcing an exclusive trade treaty with the isolated Land of the Lamas, the British were eager to continue the mapping of their frontiers. As the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra had already been envisioned as the probable “highway of the future” between British India and the forcibly opened Tibet, a branch of Younghusband’s expedition led by a British officer named Captain C.H.D. Ryder was commissioned to push on beyond where Kinthup had turned back and to follow the Tsangpo and Dihang all the way to Assam. (This was the same year, 1904, in which the British brought a railroad to Victoria Falls as part of a projected Cape to Cairo Railway Line that was to traverse the entire African continent through territory held by the United Kingdom.) Like all earlier attempts to penetrate the Tsangpo gorges, however, Ryder’s expedition was thwarted, in his case after a mule train carrying essential equipment and supplies was ambushed en route to Lhasa.

  Nonetheless, the hook was set. It became conventional wisdom that it was in the commercial and imperial interests of the British Raj to open a route to Tibet along the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra River. In 1906, the president of the Royal Geographical Society wrote: The one great natural highway into Tibet is indicated by the valley of the Brahmaputra, which may possibly not only lead by easy grades to the plateau, but directly taps such wealthy valleys as may exist in Zayul and Poyul [Powo]. . . . Approaching the great bend the valley obviously closes to something in the nature of a gorge, and the stupendous falls . . . can only be outflanked by a turning road involving a considerable detour. . . . There is nothing so far which can be reckoned as a formidable obstacle to the engineering of a road unless it be the falls . . . but a further and more detailed exploration of the valley is urgently required.20

  In 1911, Noel Williamson, Jack Needham’s successor as assistant political Officer in Sadiya, made a further push “to get up to the falls” from Assam. On the pretext of arranging for a poll-tax from the local tribes and “to ascertain the extent of Tibetan and Chinese influence in Abor country,” Williamson and his Tibetan-speaking companion Dr. Gregorson ventured into territory that the British had circumspectly avoided for decades. The expedition was soon massacred by an Abor war party. The majority of Williamson and Gregarson’s Naga, Miri, and Gurkha retainers were speared as they attempted to escape from the Abor morang, or long house, where they had lodged, and the two Britishers were hacked to death with daos. The few who got away were tracked down by Abor hunting dogs and slaughtered by the banks of the Dihang.

  The British government sent out a “miniature army” to avenge the murders. It confronted stockades, rock-chutes, and concealed pits lined with poisoned stakes, but the relentless advance of more than 7,000 fighting troops and 3,500 spear-wielding coolies from the Naga Hills eventually forced the Abor gams, or chieftains, to concede victory to the Raj. They heralded their surrender by sending a courier with a double-bent sword and spearhead, signifying their pledge of future peace.

  The hostile tribes guarding the frontiers with Tibet had now been subjugated, offering the British an unprecedented opportunity to explore their long-coveted passageway to Tibet. The major survey column of the Abor Field Force headed north up the Dihang with the express mission “to explore and survey as much of the country as possible, if practicable the Pemakoi [Pemako] falls and incidentally settling the question of the identity of the Tsangpo and the Dihang rivers.”21 Two columns explored surrounding watersheds while the main party, led by Assam’s district commissioner with an escort of three hundred rifles under a Captain Trenchard, advanced 24 marches up the Dihang to the last of the Abor villages. Supplies had begun to run out and lacking resolute leadership, the column was unable to penetrate into the region that Kinthup himself had explored nearly three decades earlier. One commanding officer wrote: I loathe walking day after day for miles . . . and climbing up and down hills over impossible paths. One is bored with sleeping on the ground and getting wet for the sake of geographical additions to the map.22

  Confronting a range of jagged snow-covered peaks, the expedition leader, Captain Bentnick, began to doubt the value of their mission, referring to Kinthup’s report as “one of the romances of the Survey of India.” “It may be said in a word,” he continued, �
�that the nearer we got to where the falls ought to be the less there was to be known of them.” Their Abor guides offered to continue but demanded that at least three British officers go with them. “One of you,” they said, “will probably die because the country is so bad, and then you will blame us, whereas if three go two may die, but there will still be one to come back and say that it was not our fault.”23 Soon enough, thick fog, torrential rains, deep snows, and the sheer weight of the unknown brought the expedition to an ignominious halt.

  THE MORE IMPREGNABLE THE TSANGPO’S inner gorges seemed, the more the British speculated about what they might conceal. The vast drop in altitude between where the Tsangpo mysteriously disappeared and where it reemerged in Assam as the Brahmaputra supported the notion of a giant waterfall, but the region had thwarted the best efforts of the British Raj to penetrate its depths.

  At the turn of the century the unexplored gorges of the Tsangpo were as talked about as Everest, the existence of “the stupendous falls” in their innermost depths calculated through a formula of hope and statistical estimation.24 Fifty years earlier, on November 16, 1855, David Livingstone had spied the billowing mists of Mosi-oa-Tunya, The Smoke That Thunders, on the Zambezi River and dutifully renamed the 355-foot cataract after the Empress of the British Empire. Victoria Falls became an enduring symbol of imperial power in the heart of the Dark Continent. Now the imagined waterfall in the deepest reaches of the Tsangpo gorge promised to be an analogous geographical trophy, a jewel in the crown of the British Raj.25 As the president of the Royal Geographical Society put it: In those good times when the last relics of savage barbarism shall give place to that interchange of commercial rights which is, after all, the best guarantee of international peace (a guarantee founded on mutual interest), it will be realized that the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra is the natural highway from India to Tibet . . . and we shall have a Tibetan branch of the Assam railway, and a spacious hotel for sightseers and sportsmen at the falls. This prospect is not more visionary than twenty-five years was that of a modern hotel at the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi; or the splendid establishments which will soon overlook the falls of Iguazu on the Parana’, in South America.26