The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  Although it was known only through the unverified report of an unlettered agent of the British government, the Falls of the Tsangpo had transformed in popular imagination into a topographical holy grail.

  MY EFFORTS TO SECURE PERMISSION from Chinese authorities to visit the Tsangpo gorge had all been routinely denied. I determined to follow the example of the Pundits and to travel there without official sanction. In June 1986, I arrived in Lhasa with detailed notes on how to proceed surreptitiously along the restricted road paralleling the Tsangpo River. The notes—gathered from Tibetans who had traveled in the region in recent years—revealed the location of Chinese military check posts, bridges that could be circumvented at night by yak-skin coracles, and, when the road ended, unguarded passes by which I could enter into Pemako. To cover the 300 miles between Lhasa and the region of the Tsangpo gorges, I had counted on hiding in the back of a Tibetan logging truck—an established means of transport when traveling beyond the range of permits. But penalties for drivers had become harsh and, after numerous unsuccessful attempts to secure a ride, my covert operation ended at a dismal truck stop east of Lhasa. Frustrated, I returned to Kathmandu.

  Long before me, a British field lieutenant named Frederick Marsham Bailey had also tried to reach the Tsangpo gorges without the formality of a permit or passport. A twenty-one-year-old officer on the 1904 Younghusband mission, Bailey was profoundly affected by the failure of Captain Ryder’s expedition. As he wrote: “Was there somewhere in the no-man’s land which lay between Assam and the terra incognita of Tibet a waterfall which would rival or even surpass Niagara? . . . It became one of my ambitions to solve the mystery of the Tsangpo gorges and I did everything in my power to equip myself for the task . . . [making] plans for attempting alone and as a private individual what the party under Ryder . . . had failed to achieve.”27

  As travel through central Tibet was still restricted, he set out from Peking in January 1911 with a sixteen-year-old Tibetan servant named Putambu, resolved to establish whether the Falls of the Tsangpo were real and to make a rough topographical survey of the lands through which he traveled. Tibetan officials blocked his passage, but he remained undaunted, and in 1912 he secured a place for himself as intelligence officer on a mission into tribal regions east of the Dihang, the name given to the Tsangpo after it crosses the Tibetan border and flows into Assam. While the expedition surveyed a major tributary, Bailey learned of a remote settlement called Mipi that was inhabited by Tibetans. Bailey took a small party to investigate, and after an eight-day march through dense jungle, they reached a collection of huts surrounded by fields of barley. The Tibetans had no warning of the British advance, and when Bailey arrived at the village with his armed escort the Tibetans fled, believing them to be Chinese soldiers sent there to kill them.

  After allaying the Tibetans’ suspicions, Bailey befriended the local headman, who told him that, ten years earlier, one hundred Khampas in flight from mounting Chinese oppression had journeyed to this remote valley, where they built a temple—Karmoling—from timber and bamboo and set up a base from which to search for Chimé Yangsang Né, the paradisiacal sanctuary described in Padmasambhava’s prophecies.

  Bailey learned that their quest for the lost paradise had been headed by a lama named Jedrung Rinpoche who had unearthed a neyig called Clear Light from a cave in eastern Tibet. The scroll described a crystal mountain in the heart of Pemako with multiple valleys spreading out around it “like the leaves of a thousand-petalled lotus.” The hidden sanctuary promised refuge from famine, disease, and war and offered caves for “attaining supreme spiritual accomplishments.” Healing springs and medicinal plants assured longevity and miraculous powers. The texts described a “secret path” through dense forests and enumerated the many dangers such as tigers, leopards, and venomous snakes that seekers would face en route, but they failed to indicate what would turn out to be the pilgrims’ greatest obstacle: the hostile tribes that confounded their every effort to journey farther up the valley.28

  The following year, 1903, two thousand more Tibetans had set out from eastern Tibet to join the remote colony of pilgrims. Many died while crossing high snow-covered passes and many more starved when the valleys near Mipi proved unable to support such large numbers. Many of the new arrivals attempted to return to Tibet but perished on the way. The Tibetan settlers who stayed were increasingly harassed by the Chulikata Mishmis. As quarrels escalated, the tribesmen began burning the Tibetans’ crops and houses, setting traps along jungle paths, and shooting at them with poisoned arrows. The savagery of the natives, coupled with the ceaseless rainfall and blood-sucking flies, caused many of the pilgrims to lose faith that they were on the threshold of an earthly paradise, and in 1909, when Jedrung Rinpoche returned to Tibet, the majority of pilgrims returned with him. The ninety Tibetans who remained in Mipi were for the most part too old or feeble to attempt the journey, Bailey noted, let alone continue the search for Yangsang. The Mishmi attacks continued unabated. Two of the Khampa men who stayed back to protect the remaining colony were wounded in an ambush the day before Bailey’s arrival and were treated by the expedition doctor.

  BAILEY LEARNED THAT THE TIBETANS had better relations with the Mishmis of the Emra valley to the west. The tribesmen sold them bamboo baskets, musk, rice, and silks, which the Tibetans carried over high mountain passes into Tibet and bartered for salt, wool, swords, and cooking pots, all of which were highly valued by the local tribes. Bailey quickly realized that this trade route into Tibet was the opportunity he had been waiting for.

  Bailey proposed a journey north along the trade route to Captain Henry Morshead, a surveyor attached to the expedition who had impressed him with his “keenness, efficiency and his extraordinary powers of physical endurance.” During their journey through Mishmi territory, Morshead often made daily climbs of several thousand feet, waiting on ridge tops for hours in mist and rain for a fleeting break in the weather to triangulate on a distant snow-covered peak across the border in Tibet. He leapt at the opportunity.

  Bailey and Morshead set out with ten porters and three Tibetan guides on the astrologically determined date of May 16, 1913 (10th day of the 4th moon of the Water Ox Year). They carried meager rations of barley meal, tea, sugar, and powdered rice that Bailey hoped to supplement with wild pheasants that “were there in great numbers.” Cutting their way through dense bamboo that “grew so close together that it was impossible to push or squeeze between them and we had to hack our way through,” they proceeded toward the first of the passes. Sinking up to their waists in snow, they crossed the pass in pouring rain that they would soon learn was a near constant presence in the lands of Pemako. On the far side they descended avalanching slopes into thick fir forests, passing the “fleshless skeletons” of past pilgrims who had perished in this no-man’s land of mist, rain, and swamp.

  Days later they surmounted the pass that would lead them to Chimdro, the first settlement in Tibet. Gazing down from the top of the 14,395-foot pass Bailey described “what looked like an inferno.” As he wrote: “We could not see the bottom of the valley. Clouds of dark mist came billowing up obliterating the view. All we saw were steep cliffs in every direction down which, without any firing of gunshots, great masses of snow would break off and avalanche into the mist below.” Descending the precipitous slope through waist-deep snow, the mists parted and “there was a gasp of horror as we saw that the slope ended in a sheer drop.” Caught in an avalanche, Bailey saved himself with the handle of his butterfly net while his Tibetan guide, Sonam Chumbi, swept past him, calling out for salvation to Padmasambhava before coming to rest safely at the edge of the cliff. That night, their guides chanted prayers and gave thanks for their successful passage.

  Once in Chimdro, Bailey dispatched one of the Tibetans to announce their arrival. “Since we had no authority to be where we were,” Bailey wrote, “our best tactic was to behave as if we had.” The headman in Mipi had written them letters of introducti
on, and Bailey had brought photographs of the Panchen and Dalai Lamas; with these they managed to allay suspicions and secure food and transport for their journey down the Chimdro River to its confluence with the Tsangpo. Descending three days “through thick forests and climbing over ladders,” they reached the river and began heading north up the east bank.

  Thirty years earlier, Kinthup had traveled through the same terrain. Bailey wrote: “The villages on the opposite bank which we passed fitted in well with Kinthup’s report. If he remembered these so well four years after he had visited them, we told ourselves that he could hardly have been mistaken about the Great Falls.”

  As they traveled upriver, Bailey asked continuously about the waterfall farther up the gorge, but the information he received was sketchy and vague.29 Villagers became increasingly hostile. A representative of the Powo court—fearing they were in league with the Chinese—forced the two explorers to change direction and escorted them to Showa over a high snow-covered pass. Powo’s remaining court officials kept them there as virtual prisoners until they proved their status as British subjects.30

  Once cleared, Bailey and Morshead resumed their journey, traveling westward down the Po Tsangpo River in hopes of following it to its confluence with the Tsangpo. Morshead continued his surveying work while Bailey kept notes on the fiefdom’s system of taxation and political relations with Lhasa. When time permitted, he netted butterflies and combed the fir and cypress forests for rare pheasants.

  Farther down the valley, a flash flood had washed away the bridges leading southward toward the great horseshoe bend of the Tsangpo, and Bailey and Morshead veered west for ten days until they could cross the Tsangpo well above the gorge.

  Bailey and Morshead arrived in the village of Gyala on July 17 and continued downriver to the small monastery of Pemakochung, where three decades earlier Kinthup and the Chinese lama had searched fruitlessly for a route deeper into the gorge. “The river here is an extraordinary sight,” Bailey wrote, “falling in one roaring rapid over which hangs a mist of spray. In places the water is dashed up in waves twenty feet high.”

  Huge mountains, mostly obscured by clouds, towered on both sides of the river. Their Tibetan guides referred to the peaks as the head and breasts of the Tantric meditational deity Dorje Pagmo, Pemako’s anima mundi. Although Bailey noted these ethnographical facts in his journal, he and Morshead were more concerned with the mountains’ heights. Triangulating from 100 miles to the south and taking into account the curvature of the earth, atmospheric refractions, and plumb-line deflections, surveyors on the Abor expedition of 1912 had already determined the glacier-covered peak of Namcha Barwa on the south side of the gorge to be 25,445 feet above sea level. Morshead and Bailey had both seen the unmapped peak called Gyala Pelri on the northern side of the gorge during the survey of the upper Dibang and Morshead had already fixed its altitude at 23,460 feet. (This measurement was later adjusted to 23,891). Both peaks were known, but no one had realized that the Tsangpo flowed between them. Clearly this was one of the earth’s deepest gorges.

  Bailey searched below the Pemakochung monastery for the waterfall described in Kinthup’s report but, after lowering himself by roots and vines through a tunnel in the rock, he discovered only a thirty-foot drop where the Tsangpo narrowed to a width of fifty yards and sent up plumes of spray. Beneath the falls, the passageway formed a subterranean grotto where pilgrims had lit butter-lamps and gazed out from a ledge at the rainbows that form above the thundering waters.

  With dwindling supplies, Morshead and Bailey returned upriver to the village of Gyala. Across from the small collection of houses, a waterfall poured over a 150-foot limestone cliff and disgorged into the Tsangpo. Bailey learned that this sinuous cataract was also an important place of pilgrimage and reachable by a primitive ferry that crossed the Tsangpo where it widened beneath the falls into the semblance of a lake. The falls were named after Shinje Chogyal, the Tibetan Lord of Death that Waddell’s artist had depicted behind the curtain of falling water in the sketch in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London. Bailey surmised that this tributary cascade had been conflated in the Survey of India’s official report with the thirty-foot falls below Pemakochung—whether due to some fault in Kinthup’s memory or an error on the part of the scribe.

  Bailey’s discovery of the mistake in the Survey’s report did not dispel the myth of a colossal waterfall on Tibet’s greatest river; it simply suggested that the falls must lie farther downriver in the Tsangpo’s unexplored chasms. Bailey had tried to push on alone below Pemakochung, but mutinous porters had thrown down his load and abandoned him at the base of a cliff. “The question of whether or not there were a falls on the Tsangpo was still of great interest,” Bailey wrote. “There now remains a gap between the lowest point I was able to reach below Pemakochung (7,480 feet) and Gompo Né (5,700 feet). There is no track of any kind on this stretch of the river, and it was difficult to obtain any information, but, from what I was able to find out from the Monpas who deserted me at the cliff . . . the distance must be about twenty miles.”

  BAILEY AND MORSHEAD RETURNED to British territory in November of 1913, traveling to Calcutta by train and reporting soon after in Simla, the newly established summer capital of the British Raj. Several months later, Kinthup was found in Darjeeling, where he was working as a tailor, a skill he had learned during his captivity in Tibet. Summoned to the government offices in Simla, he arrived barefoot and dressed in his deep crimson woolen chuba, a mala of 108 beads strung around his neck. Kinthup looked less a retired secret agent than the pilgrim he perhaps always was. As he related his journey through Pemako, it emerged that Kinthup had never mentioned a great waterfall on the Tsangpo. Being illiterate, he had dictated his account to an Indian scribe, describing the 150-foot cascade at Gyala which conceals an image of Shinje Chogyal, the Tibetan Lord of Death, and reported the thirty-foot drop on the Tsangpo at Pemakochung. As Bailey had suspected, the error was due to a misunderstanding or mistranslation of Kinthup’s words. Either the scribe or the clerk who had translated the document into English had conflated the two waterfalls. Kinthup, not being able to read the report, had never been aware of the mistake.

  Bailey requested that the British government of India grant Kinthup a small pension “in recognition of his service to Tibetan exploration,” but fearing an “indefinite financial commitment” the government offered him only a thousand rupee bonus. Either way, Kinthup did not need the money. He returned to Darjeeling and died a few months later. Although they never reached the Tsangpo’s innermost gorge to confirm or dispel the possibility of a falls deeper in the chasm, Bailey and Morshead’s journey brought the mystery of the link between the Tsangpo and Brahmaputra rivers to a definitive end. They established that, after flowing for nearly a thousand miles across southern Tibet, the Tsangpo enters a narrow chasm between the towering summits of Namcha Barwa and Gyala Pelri, cutting through the Himalayan range in one of the deepest, longest, and most spectacular gorges on the planet. Although the section of the gorge that Bailey and Morshead had been unable to enter remained totally unknown, they had narrowed the blank space on the map to less than fifty miles.

  Although they themselves lost faith in the possibility of a colossal waterfall in the heart of the Tsangpo gorge, others were not so ready to concede defeat. Shortly after their return, a reporter for London’s Morning Post interviewed Sir Thomas Holdich, the former president of the Royal Geographical Society. On November 18, 1913, Londoners read: “While paying a tribute to Captain Bailey’s intrepidity and entire credibility as a witness, [Sir Thomas] expressed the gravest doubt whether he could possibly have acquired such evidence as would justify him in saying that the Brahmaputra Falls did not exist.” Sir Thomas was quoted as saying that: “The evidence as to their non-existence is imperfect . . . The question of the falls must remain still in the air.”

  BRITISH EXPLORERS OF THE VICTORIAN and Edwardian age were n
ot all merely agents of empire armed with theodolites, plane tables, and dreams of conquest. Most were as committed to getting off the map as to charting the frontiers of colonized territories. Departing from Bombay for the coast of Africa in 1856, Sir Richard Burton wrote in his journal: “Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy.”31 A generation later Sir Henry Morton Stanley wrote of his “perfect independence” of mind in Africa. “It is not repressed by fear, nor depressed by ridicule and insults . . . but now preens itself, and soars free and unrestrained; which liberty to a vivid mind, imperceptibly changes the whole man.”32 In 1871 David Livingstone—the first white man to have seen Victoria Falls—explained his wanderings through the Dark Continent as “God’s doing . . . I am away from the perpetual hurry of civilization, and I think I see far and clear into what is to come ...”33