The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  We landed at an airstrip built along the braided channels of this legendary river, which has served for millennia as the central artery of Tibetan civilization. Tibetan myths correspond with the geological record and describe the Tsangpo as the remnants of a vast, primeval sea that once covered the Tibetan plateau. Forty to fifty million years ago, the Indian subcontinent began to collide with the Asian landmass, forcing the earth upward into collosal mountains and reducing the ancient Sea of Tethys to scattered lakes and the great river that now flowed before us along the tectonic fault line.

  From its source near Mount Kailas in far western Tibet, the Tsangpo—which means the Great Purifier—descends from glaciers and flows eastward through an arid landscape of rock outcrops, wind-blasted dunes, and scrub juniper. As it drops in altitude into warmer, forested regions east of Lhasa, it forms an ever-narrowing chasm, gradually transforming into seething rapids as it bores its way through a still-uplifting wall of jagged, glacier-covered peaks at the eastern end of the Himalayan range. Plunging between two of the world’s highest mountains, Namcha Barwa (the Blazing Meteorite) and Gyala Pelri (the Glorious Peak), the river forms a gorge three times as deep as the Grand Canyon and hailed by Chinese geologists as the world’s deepest.1

  A CHINESE GEOLOGIST from the Institute of Mineral Sciences in Chengdu met me at the airstrip. Introducing himself as the guide and liaison officer attached to Richard Fisher’s “Namcha Barwa Grand Canyon Rafting Expedition,” Geng Quanru—or “Mr. Gunn,” as he called himself—told me that Fisher had left with the group at 5 a.m. that morning as they were becoming “scattered” in Lhasa. If we drove all night, Gunn said, we could catch up with them the next morning.

  The road to Lhasa runs west along the southern banks of the Tsangpo. The river was more than a mile across here, its gray-green currents punctuated by shifting sandbars, hazards for the yak-hide coracles and primitive barges that ply these placid midsections of the river. Green fields of barley and lines of poplar and dwarf willow fringed the opposite bank, beneath gray cliffs and barren shale-strewn peaks. We turned north over a bridge guarded by Chinese soldiers and, in another hour, drove into Tibet’s capital.

  While Gunn and the Chinese driver filled reserve tanks with gasoline, I made a quick visit to the Jokhang, Tibet’s most revered temple. Built more than 1,800 years ago, the Jokhang draws pilgrims from all corners of the plateau. Nomads in yak-hide chubas and Khampas from eastern Tibet sporting high fox fur hats and mirrored sunglasses poured crushed juniper into stone censers outside the main gates. Fragrant smoke curled into the sky as offerings to ancient spirits as pilgrims wound their way into the Jokhang’s interior.

  The temple’s innermost sanctum harbors a golden, jewel-encrusted Buddha, but the building’s original purpose was to stake down the heart of a malevolent demoness, the Srinmo, whose limbs and energies were said to spread throughout the Tibetan landscape. Tibet’s earliest chronicles narrate how the Srinmo’s various body parts were pinned down with multitiered Buddhist temples, allowing the Buddhist doctrine to flourish. Two hundred and fifty miles to the east of Lhasa, near the entrance to the Tsangpo gorge, a gilt-roofed temple immobilizes the Srinmo’s right elbow. Another seventh-century structure in Powo, the Dungchu Lhakhang, is said to decommission her left hand. Many of the scrolls describing Pemako were discovered in these ancient temples.2

  All food on the expedition was to be provided by our Chinese host agency, and before setting out from Lhasa, Gunn brought me to a lavish Szechuan-style restaurant with round windows and a red velvet ceiling. The pig’s intestines that constituted our main course were not a personal favorite, nor were the tins of sweetened black fish I saw the driver loading into the back of the Land Cruiser. In the markets surrounding the Jokhang, I stocked up on dried yak meat, tsampa, and apricot kernels. Apart from desiring more palatable fare, I wanted to be sure that I could head out on my own. I was not optimistic about the proposed rafting trip, and my major incentive for joining Fisher’s expedition was to get through the series of armed check posts on the three-day drive to the gorge leading into Pemako.

  My sense of antipiciation was mounting. Aside from the gorge’s sacred significance to Tibetans, it was a naturalist’s wonderland. Surging through a mountain wall only slightly lower than Mount Everest, the Tsangpo carves its way downward between towering cliffs as warm, moisture-laden air funnels up the gorge from the Bay of Bengal. The clouds collide with the cold, dry air of the Himalayas and create a unique ecosystem that ranges from arctic to subtropical. Glaciers spill into cloud forests, and jungles and ravines teem with rare and unknown plants. Endangered species, including Tibet’s last remaining tigers, thrive in the old-growth forests of bamboo, rhododendron, and towering cypress.

  Much of Pemako lies in disputed territory between India and China. The only recent map I was able to find—a 1:250,000 projection compiled in 1954 by the Army Map Service in Washington, D.C.—was full of cautionary provisions. Some areas were simply left blank and labeled as “unexplored.” Others indicated “indefinite” borders and “approximate alignments.” Current Chinese maps show their sovereignty extending as far as the Brahmaputra valley in Assam, but they offer little topographical detail. Although China opened Tibet to tourism in the early 1980s, Pemako was designated a “special military region” and remained resolutely out of bounds. No permits had ever before been issued. Over lunch, Gunn showed me the sheaves of documents from China’s Bureau of Foreign Affairs, the Military High Command in Beijing, and Lhasa’s Public Security Bureau that he would have to show at checkpoints along the road leading toward the gorge. I kept the translations of the treasure scrolls that I had brought with me from Kathmandu well hidden.

  WE DROVE EASTWARD OUT OF LHASA along roads like dry riverbeds. Plumes of dust streamed behind us across the treeless plains. We climbed higher, over snow-covered passes where our tires lurched through slush and half-frozen mud, dangerously close to precipitous drops. Gunn sat in the front of the Toyota Land Cruiser conversing with the driver and recycling the same cassette tape of what sounded like Chinese opera hour after hour. Jostled in the backseat, I brooded about the forthcoming rafting expedition over perhaps the most treacherous stretch of river in the world. My own desire was to wander on foot through Pemako’s mist-shrouded valleys, following a very different itinerary. The fact that I had twice nearly drowned, once on a rafting expedition in Nepal, didn’t add to my enthusiasm.

  I thought of my great grandfather, who had nearly drowned while surveying for the Canadian Pacific Railway during the same years—1881-83—that Kinthup had performed his covert mission for the British Survey of India. Charged with mapping a route through the Rocky Mountains and the lesser-known “snow-clad desolation” of the Selkirk Range, William Edgar Baker (1856-1921) had kept a journal that I’d read as a teenager. I was enthralled by his tales of encounters with roving bands of Blackfoot, Shushwap, and Piegan Indians and, as he ventured deeper into the wilderness, with beaver swamps and moss-carpeted forests where he was “more apt to see bears than anyone else in the party.” His wife, my great grandmother, called him the Ruffian, and my father once had a photograph of him looking the part, with a thick black beard and piercing eyes and brandishing a cutlass.

  I thought of another long-dead relative, my great-great grandfather, Captain George Knight Griffin, who had journeyed to the Klondike at the age of seventy-six and had been the only member of his party not to drown in the Yukon. A line from his 1904 obituary had stayed with me: “He did not know what it was to fear either man or beast and his reckless courage often placed him in dangerous situations.” If I was being foolhardy, perhaps it was in the blood.

  Bounding along the muddy, rutted road into the small hours of the night, I thought of the ten Americans crammed into the two Land Cruisers somewhere ahead of us and felt grateful for the time alone. Darkness and frost on the windows of the Land Cruiser veiled the landscape that passed beyond us. Sometime after midnight, we stopped at
a derelict roadside hostelry. The dormitory-style rooms were filled with Chinese and Tibetan truck drivers plying the route between Lhasa and eastern Tibet. The proprietor gave me a bed next to a Khampa trader whose wide-brimmed felt hat shielded his eyes from the glare of a bare security bulb that hung from the ceiling.

  We started out again at dawn and we caught up with the rest of the group before noon in the town of Bayi, a colonial outpost built by Chinese soldiers on land reclaimed from a tributary of the Tsangpo. The town’s broad avenues, lined with chandeliered street lights, passed between garish buildings built from blue glass and porcelain tile. As we turned a corner near the center of town, we saw Fisher and his group assembled in front of their two mud-splattered Land Cruisers. Bayi was officially closed to foreigners, and three members of Fisher’s group who had strayed from a small noodle shop where they had stopped for lunch had been brought in for questioning by plainclothed officials of the local Public Security Bureau, China’s secret police. As we drove up, Fisher was reprimanding his wayward charges—now released—for endangering the expedition.

  DURING HIS DRAWN-OUT MONOLOGUE I met another member of the group, Ken Storm, Jr., partner in a family enterprise called Aladdin Distributors in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As Fisher continued his tirade, Ken and I drifted away from the main group and sought refuge behind one of the Toyotas. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, Ken wore the determined air of a missionary bound for far horizons. Ken had traveled extensively in the western Himalayas and had trekked solo through Mexico’s Copper Canyon; he had also rafted and kayaked throughout the United States. Richard Fisher (Rick) had recruited him because of his extensive white-water experience, though Ken shared my own doubts about the expedition. He confided that in Lhasa, Rick had forbidden them even to leave their hotel, a Chinese-built edifice with an artificial waterfall and plastic storks suspended from the ceiling. They should conserve their energy for the expedition, Rick had told them, not wander into the bazaars and temples of downtown Lhasa.

  Ken had secured a 1:500,000 aeronautical chart of southeastern Tibet from the Defense Mapping Agency Aerospace Center in St. Louis, Missouri. He had photocopied additional maps from a book called Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges, written by the intrepid Britsh plant collector Frank Kingdon Ward, who had entered the Tsangpo gorge in 1924, ten years after Captain F. M. Bailey and Henry Morshead’s own efforts to locate the waterfall. Calculating from the boiling points made by Kingdon Ward and his companion, a twenty-four-year old Scottish lord, Ken was convinced even before leaving the States that the river’s rate of descent and enormous volume would make the gorge unrunnable. Where Rick claimed to have scouted near the entrance to the gorge, the gradient was already 50 feet per mile. Deeper into the canyon it dropped between 150 and 200 feet per mile.3 In comparison, Ken pointed out, the Colorado River descends through the Grand Canyon at an average of only 8 feet per mile and with a much lesser volume. Comparing the figures, Ken concluded that, although kayakers might have some chance, to attempt the Tsangpo in a raft would be suicidal. Ken had shared his calculations with Rick more than a month earlier in the United States, but Rick would not be dissuaded from his ambition to be the first down the gorge in a boat.

  IN 1924, THE SAME YEAR that George Leigh Mallory disappeared into mist near the summit of Mount Everest, Captain Frank Kingdon Ward and his companion, the Fifth Earl of Cawdor, had attempted to push beyond where Bailey and Morshead had been forced to retreat. “There remained a gap of 50 miles,” Kingdon Ward wrote, “about which nothing was known; indeed, for half that distance there was said to be no track of any sort near the river, which was hemmed in by bare rock walls several thousand feet high. Was it possible that hidden away in the depths of this unknown gorge there was a great waterfall? Such a thing was quite possible, and it was this question that we were resolved to answer. We would, if possible, go right through the gorge, and tear this last secret from its heart. . . . Here if anywhere were the ‘Falls of the Brahmaputra’ which had been a geographical mystery for more than a century; and the solution—falls? or no falls?—was now within our grasp.”4

  Kingdon Ward persevered beyond where Bailey had been able to reach but, confronted by “a howling river . . . boring ever more deeply into the bowels of the earth . . . ,” was eventually forced to climb out of the yawning chasm up a rock face which he later described as the most harrowing episode in his several decades of Himalayan exploration. Forging their way through what Lord Jack Cawdor described as “particularly pestilential jungle,” the two explorers penetrated all but a five-to-ten-mile section of the Tsangpo’s innermost chasm. They documented several waterfalls on the river, estimating their height to be no more than thirty to forty feet. Kingdon Ward returned to England, and in his lecture at the Royal Geographical Society he concluded that the fabled Falls of the Tsangpo—a “waterfall of a hundred feet or more”—was probably no more than a “romance of geography” and a “religious myth.” For his efforts, Kingdon Ward was awarded the society’s coveted Gold Medal of Exploration. Since his well-publicized account, no further attempt had been made to penetrate the still-unknown section of the Tsangpo gorge. Ken was as enchanted by the idea of this “blank spot of delightful mystery” as I was, if for somewhat different reasons, and equally convinced that it was mad to attempt to reach it in a raft.5 We began to discuss how we might break away from the group and enter the gorge on foot.

  As we climbed back into the overcrowded Land Cruisers, Rick squinted at Ken and me from beneath his red bandana, as if aware of impending insurrection in the ranks. Squeezed in between fellow passengers, we drove southward along the Gyamda Chu, a tributary river that flows into the Tsangpo from the north.

  YEARS EARLIER IN DHARAMSALA, the Dalai Lama had directed me to a white-haired lama named Khamtrul Jamyang Dondrup Rinpoche who had escaped the Communist invasion by following the Tsangpo River into Pemako. While traveling through the Tsangpo gorges in the late 1950s, Khamtrul Rinpoche had dreamed of being swallowed by an emanation of Pemako’s guardian goddess, Dorje Pagmo, and was guided through her anatomy toward the innermost sanctum of the hidden-land. He had kept a journal of his odyssey. It began with ominous prophecies regarding Tibet’s future and ended with visionary accounts of Pemako’s paradisiacal center and its wealth of magical plants: Of all obscure and mystic places, Pemako is supreme—resplendent like an immaculate lotus flower. . . . To enter the hidden-land we travelled after dark upon perilous and slippery rocks through pounding dark rain. . . . We took shelter in caves where Padmasambhava had left imprints of his feet in solid rock and where mantric syllables had manifested on the walls. . . . [At the heart chakra of Dorje Pagmo] lie meadows arrayed like a mandala and surrounded by a ring of mountains. Growing here are the five supreme magical plants . . . which confer immortality . . . and the experience of emptiness and bliss. This innermost heart of the sublime holy land is identical to a terrestrial pure land of lotus light. In this place, all obscurations of mind and emotions can be released . . . and the three bodies of the Buddha spontaneously realized ...6

  Khamtrul Rinpoche had followed the same route into the gorges as Kingdon Ward, and he too had been unable to penetrate the hidden sections of the gorge on foot, nor locate the “five supreme magical plants.” As I took notes, he described the caves and rocks where he had camped and the visions and dreams that had guided him deeper into the hidden-land.

  TWO HOURS BEYOND BAYI, we reached the northern bank of the Tsangpo. Green-uniformed Chinese soldiers with AK-47s stood guard over a bridge leading across to the southern shore. Gunn deferentially gave them packs of Wufeng cigarettes and brought out his stack of permits. While the humorless officers made a cursory inspection of our belongings, I watched a small yak-skin coracle float by on the river, its lone boatman losing himself to view as he drifted down on swift currents. Crowded into the Land Cruiser with accidental companions, I regretted momentarily that I had not come as I had originally planned; without a permit
, surrendering to the currents of circumstance. The river here was broad and silted after having flowed for nearly 1,000 miles across southern Tibet. The glacier-covered slopes of Namcha Barwa, the eastern terminus of the Himalayas, glistened above us behind dark clouds. Beyond the horizon, the Tsangpo began its circuit around this sacred mountain, transforming into seething rapids and losing itself in the three-mile deep chasm that had long been the Ultima Thule of Tibetan civilization. In past centuries criminals and deposed kings were bound and thrown into this intractable river in a rite of capital punishment called chaplasorwa.7

  After crossing the bridge we drove several hours through streambeds and small slate-roofed hamlets along the southern banks of the Tsangpo. Hemlock, pine, spruce, and larch grew thickly on the slopes above us. When the road abruptly ended, we set up camp amid flowering peach trees at a small village called Kyikar. The supply truck had arrived hours earlier and our Chinese cook, sheltered in the lee of the truck’s oversized tires, was preparing a meal on what appeared to be a welding torch. We were still at high altitude—nearly 10,000 feet—and, as Gunn explained, the blowtorch could cook rice faster than a fire. After dinner Rick gathered his recruits around a bonfire made with driftwood carried up from the Tsangpo. The air was cold and I put on a Khampa fox fur hat that I’d picked up in Bayi. Rick seemed eager to determine who he had assembled for this improbable journey. He went around the circle offering what he presumed to be each person’s motivations for coming.

  Besides Rick there were eleven of us; seven “ecotourists,” as Rick referred to them, and four, myself included, on the rafting team. We were an odd assortment, each drawn here for different reasons. A retired Disney cinematographer from Alaska had cashed in a life insurance policy to finance what he called “a mission to reconnect with ‘the goddess.’ ” Others included a lawyer from Tucson, a real estate broker with a reconstructed knee, a retired brothel owner from Minneapolis and her twelve-year-old son, a physiotherapist named Jill Bielowski, and an itinerant biker/electrician named Eric Manthey who wore Levi’s jeans and a Hells Angels sweatshirt throughout the trip. Ken intrigued me most. A graduate in anthropology, he had traveled widely through Ladakh in the western Himalayas, collaborating on a book entitled Between Earth and Heaven. He had a passion for the works of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantic poets and owned many first editions. He told the group he was drawn to the Tsangpo gorges in search of the “sublime,” the “paradoxical union of delight and terror” that had seized Wordsworth on the slopes of Snowdon and Thoreau on Mount Katadyn in Maine.8 The bard of Walden Pond had cried out for “a nature no civilization can endure,” and Ken hoped to surpass his hopes in this hidden corner of Tibet.