The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  Like Yangsang, the first “promised lands” were places with genial climates, fresh water, and, most important, abundant game. Etymologically, paradise stems from a Persian word for a walled park and originally designated a private hunting preserve. Only later did paradise come to be associated with a region or state of supreme happiness. Apart from its spiritual assets, Pemako retains the qualities of a privileged hunting ground where, despite the Buddhist injunction against taking life, hunters kill with supposed impunity.25

  We boiled the takin meat in Ken’s pot as rare sunlight faded from the northern walls of Namcha Barwa. The granite spur that we would have to cross remained hidden in shadow. The porters called the spur Gyama Taki and described it as the boundary between the Tibetan district of Kongpo and the regions of Pemako. The river exploded against the base of the great buttress before coiling northward and disappearing into a wilderness of rock and cloud. Gunn had been sitting at a distance, poring over a Chinese military map he refused to show us. When we called him over for food, he proclaimed almost hopefully that there was no way either around or over this granite barrier. He discoursed on its composition: white-and-black-banded gneiss, a coarse-grained metamorphic rock made up of feldspar, mica, and quartz.

  If Olmula was right, hidden somewhere above us was the Secret Pass of the Dakinis. The future of our expedition depended on finding it. Sitting by the fire, Dawa Tsering revealed that Breashears had talked to the old woman through his Chinese guide, but their communication had faltered. After failing to round the buttress, they had tried to climb up to a notch between two pinnacles of rock but had been forced down by falling rocks and the steepening incline. Dawa wasn’t optimistic about the route that Olmula had invoked. “There are only cliffs up there,” he said. “Higher up there are treacherous glaciers.” Nonetheless, despite Breashears and Wiltsie’s failed attempt, Dawa retained some hope that we might still find a route across the cliff.

  AT FIRST LIGHT on the morning of May 6 Dawa Tsering and three other porters made a final effort to find a route around the headwall, but returned dejected. Armed with freshly sharpened apches and a climbing rope, Sherab launched into the jungle with two other hunters to search for the Khandro Sang-La. The rest of the porters stayed in camp, drying takin meat over open fires or washing in the thermal springs. With a break in the rain and a supply of fresh meat, the porters’ moods had visibly improved and the prospect of being paid double wages for the way ahead compensated for the uncertainty of the route. Even its etymology was obscure. Some called it Khandro Sang-Lam, the Secret Path of the Dakinis. Others insisted it was Khandro Sang-La, the Dakinis’ Secret Pass. Either way, as the day progressed, we had doubts that Sherab would actually find a way through, or even tell us if he did.

  Shortly before dark, we heard Sherab’s calls echoing through the forest above us. Soon afterward, the three scouts stumbled into camp and sat down by the fire. They’d been out for eleven hours. They had found a route to the top of the jagged ridge and had looked down into the dense jungles of Shekarlungpa. It was late and they had not descended on the other side, but they were hopeful that, with ropes, we would be able to enter into the hidden ravines below. In a last ditch effort to convince us to turn back, Gunn talked again about safety and suggested that it would be better to go back the way we had come.

  ON MAY 7, WE ROSE EARLY and began climbing through rain-drenched jungle. Sherab had had inauspicious dreams and remained disturbingly quiet as he searched for the blazes that he had made the day before. The slope became progressively steeper, and we hauled ourselves up by tree branches and water-saturated shrubs. Leeches dropped down our necks and burrowed into our sodden boots. Our hands bled from clinging to briars and serrated plants. Higher up, the eroding slopes were covered in delicate ferns, small purple orchids, and a variety of mushrooms. We ascended avalanche chutes and crossed into a zone of unstable rock outcrops. Rocks cascaded from above, engulfing us in the characteristic smell of pulverized stone.

  WE HAD ALREADY CLIMBED more than 2,000 feet above the level of the Tsangpo. Sherab could no longer locate the blazes he had made the day before. We forged on through the green air, following the line of least resistance. The porters cut notches in a fallen log and raised it to ascend a short moss-covered cliff. Several of them removed their canvas shoes and climbed barefoot to gain better purchase on the slippery log. The pass which Sherab claimed to have found seemed as phantasmal as the lost Falls of the Tsangpo, “something ever more about to be,” as Ken put it, quoting a line from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”

  After climbing for more than five hours we reached a narrow break in the ridge—the long-sought pass. Snow plumes streamed from the peaks above us like vaporous prayer flags, but our eyes were drawn downward into the abyss below where the Tsangpo surged through a torturous chasm. A snow-covered spur of Gyala Peiri—hidden now in clouds—formed the north side of the gorge. The spur terminated in a pyramidal peak which Olmula had simply called Dorje Pagmo. To the south, the gorge was framed by an eastern extension of Namcha Barwa that appears on Kingdon Ward’s map as Sanglung but which the Tibetans called Kangla Karpo. A great spur curved down from the glacial heights, causing the Tsangpo to change its course and flow abruptly northward between the base of Dorje Pagmo and a similar peak called Dorje Traktsen on the spur descending from Kangla Karpo. Through binoculars, we could see waterfalls streaming down the granite slabs where the Tsangpo begins its great bend to the north between the two mythic sentinels. The cliffs marked the farthest point Kingdon Ward had been able to reach. Terrified of heights, he described his ascent up these dripping slabs as a nightmare.

  Between us and the Great Bend lay a morass of cliffs and trackless jungle. The Tsangpo cut through this wilderness like a white, roiling serpent, the thunder of its rapids echoing up the sides of the gorge. Takin had traveled recently through the break in the mountain wall, and Sherab and others were convinced that game would be plentiful in the unfrequented ravines spreading out below us. Ken was elated at the prospect of moving through such untrammeled wilderness. Eric was more sober, pointing out that beneath the canopy of trees were deep ravines and cliffs that we couldn’t even see. Although in the past there may have been some semblance of a trail, there were now only incipient animal tracks. Getting through would not be easy.

  THE ABYSS THAT OPENED BEFORE US was referred to in the neyigs as Shekarlungpa, the Valley of the White Crystal. The eighteenth-century Terton Rikdzin Dorje Thokme had referred to it as the right collarbone of Dorje Pagmo’s throat chakra. “Secretly,” he wrote, “it’s the place where nectar flows from the dancing dakini of great bliss, Dechen Karmo. By tasting this nectar of her outflow, one experiences the coemergent wisdom of emptiness and great bliss.”

  On his journey in the 1950s Khamtrul Rinpoche had gazed into the valley and “beheld a floating goddess amid a vast expanse of sky and surrounded by . . . glorious rainbows. . . . To the east, a crystal reliquary mound (chorten) rose from the rocks and farther in the distance I beheld land rich in lush grasses, water, and amrita. Sublime Buddhas were subduing nagas, demons, and other beings of the six realms with their vajras.”

  Although our vision of what lay ahead was far more modest, we had clearly begun to slip into mythic time ourselves. We descended into the trackless jungles of Shekarlungpa with both elation and dread, following the cloven hoof prints of migrating takin.

  The Valley of the White Crystal

  AS AGILE AS MOUNTAIN GOATS, takin can navigate rock faces that humans cannot, and we searched for alternative routes when their tracks descended over cliffs or dissipated into scree. At times, we lowered ourselves through the drizzling canopy by hanging on to boughs of trees. We reached a grottolike ravine where a waterfall cascaded into a dark pool, its waters swirling downward and over a cliff into the Tsangpo.

  We climbed out using shafts of bamboo to ascend a plant-choked cliff, then dropped through mud to a sloping grove of bamboo. There the po
rters fashioned a crude shelter to escape the rain. The ground was steep and we leveled spaces for the tents by cutting rhododendron boughs and evening out the surface with bamboo and clumps of moss.

  The porters made their customary offering of evergreen boughs in a sodden fire, but rather than excitement, there was now palpable anxiety, and their chants were more ardent. Parts of the gorge looked sheer, the rain was constant, and the jungle before us was a dense morass of interlacing limbs. From the top of the pass, we had seen to the beginning of the great bend but wraithlike clouds had now obscured all but the trees that surrounded our makeshift camp. The scat of the migrating takin indicated that they had passed through weeks before, and the hunters worried that there would be no fresh meat to supplement their dwindling supplies. As we shared a spartan meal of rice and lentils, Gunn informed us that unless we reached habitation within four days he would be out of food.

  The next morning, May 8, we packed up our sodden tents and headed into the forest. Almost immediately we confronted a steep granite slab that we crossed on slippery holds. A narrow track used by takin appeared above us and we followed it through a tunnel of thick undergrowth and, afterward, down a series of ledges. At the base, we entered a stand of alders, wading through a ground cover of waist-high ferns and stinging nettles. A maze of intractable cliffs soon blocked all progress. Gunn stared gloomily at his Chinese military map while the porters used their apches to scrape leeches from their legs, careful to avoid injuring either the blood-drunk creatures or their own limbs. The Tsangpo surged unseen beneath us between high cliffs, a constant thundering drone.

  Sherab and I looked together at the zigzagging lines that he had made in my notebook during our interview with Olmula. It was our closest approximation to a viable map. Ken’s aeronautical chart showed no contour lines and Kingdon Ward and Cawdor’s map of 1924 gave only a rough estimation of the topography. Both maps were at a scale of 1:500,000 and, however expertly surveyed, were no real help to us. Gunn finally showed us the map that he claimed he had secretly photocopied from the Chinese Military Library in Chengdu. The cause of his glumness became immediately clear. He had photocopied the original map in two parts and glued them together, and the area we were now entering had fallen off the edges of the photocopy machine. Gunn stared at the map at regular intervals nonetheless, as if it were a kind of talisman that would eventually reveal our missing coordinates.

  As best as Sherab could interpret the scrawls that he had made in my notebook, the rock buttress ahead of us was called Dotrakey. We cautiously traversed the slick rock face, grabbing at bunches of shallow-rooted grass that grew out of the cracks, until we reached a desolate cove where the Tsangpo surged up against massive boulders before cutting north and disappearing between walls of schist and limestone. A conical peak, the Shekar Potrang, emerged from the mists above us.

  Judging by their journals, Kingdon Ward and Cawdor had camped here, “hemmed in by river and cliffs.” As we attempted to level out a space for our tents amid the stones and driftwood, a long yellowish snake slid out from between the rocks. A porter lifted it up on a stick and, muttering prayers, cast it into the jungle. They referred to it as a lu, or naga, a serpent guardian of the hidden-lands. Dawa Tsering borrowed Ken’s pot to collect water from the Tsangpo but the river ripped it from his hands. We now had no pot for cooking and had to use the porters’ after they were through with brewing tea.

  Khamtrul Rinpoche had described a cave on the slopes of the jungle-covered Shekar Potrang that rose above us out of the Tsangpo like a “nomad’s tent.” According to Khamtrul Rinpoche’s account, the three-pillared cave concealed scrolls that would ultimately help in locating Yangsang Né. Khamtrul had meditated there and received “innumerable portentous omens and auspicious signs.”

  Olmula had not mentioned the cave in her account, Khamtrul Rinpoche had given no specific directions as to how to reach it, and the terrain was tangled and obscure, but I hoped that we would at least be able to look for it the following day. I drifted off to sleep to dreams of golden serpents.

  The next morning, we climbed out of the small cave and directly up the verdant cliffs of the Shekar Potrang. I spoke to Sherab about the cave, but the terrain was intimidating even to him and, with little food left, he was clearly preoccupied by reaching the pass. We could search for days and never find it, he said. Despite his obvious interest in the gorge’s spiritual assets, survival had become an overriding concern. I thought of Bailey, forced to retrace his steps out of the gorge when his porters had deserted him, his decimated boots strung together with the strap from his hypsometer. Not for the first time, the image of Bailey’s hauntingly incomplete map arose in my mind.

  F. M. Bailey’s map of the extent of his journey down the Tsangpo in 1913. The dotted line represents the river’s suspected onward course.

  DESPITE THEIR NUMEROUS HOOFPRINTS leading into the jungle, we had seen only one takin, which lumbered up a precipice before the porters could pursue it. Sherab kept out the climbing rope in hopes of setting up a snare should we come across a herd. We followed their tracks through a narrow saddle to a river which both Kingdon Ward’s map and Olmula’s account had indicated as the Churung Chu. It emerged from a wall of glacial ice that was visible above through a canopy of gnarled, narrow-leaved rhododendrons. The river was icy cold, gray, and foaming with glacial silt. Sherab brought out his string of sandalwood prayer beads and performed a divinitory rite to determine whether we should go up or down to find a way across. He blew on the polished beads and touched them to his forehead before counting off a set number. The beads indicated that we should go low. With no alternative theories of our own, we picked our way down the bank of the river on spray-drenched rocks. Before long, we dead-ended where the torrent poured off a cliff, spilling vertically 200 feet down into the Tsangpo. We headed back upstream. Putting down our loads, we felled two trees, lodged them precariously against boulders emerging midstream, and shimmied across over the surging waters.

  On the far side of the Churung Chu the trees grew larger and wilder with flowering orchids spilling from moss-encrusted limbs. The leeches too became more voracious. They burrowed through our gaiters and the strips of green canvas that the porters had wrapped around their calves and ankles in an attempt to seal them out. It wasn’t until the end of the day, when we took off our sodden and blood-filled boots, that we could see their handiwork. The saliva of the common leech harbors chemicals that anesthetize the area of the wound, while an anticoagulant called hirudin prevents the blood from clotting. The result is a painless incision that streams with blood. Only when the bleeding stops does the site of the leech bite begin to itch, often for weeks afterward.

  Eager for some technological buffer against this primal terrain, Gunn fantasized that the Chinese government would construct a cable car through the Tsangpo gorge—from Gyala all the way to the confluence. “What good is it if so few can reach this area?” he asked. “And how can they enjoy it if they do?” The porters seemed to feel differently: they marked the trail only faintly, as if to keep it purposefully vague, a green veil that would close again behind us.

  We were now in the heart of the gorge. The forest had become almost tropical. Magnolias with long pendulant leaves and vines and lianas formed a green lattice through which we forged a narrow passage. Weeping pines with long, slender blue-green needles shimmered in the rain. Peaks rose above us as waterfalls streamed through the ceiling of clouds and water poured down our collars and backs.

  We followed a narrow rhododendron-covered ridge to a steep slope where the porters reached down sticks to haul each other up. We fanned out above in search of a viable route. Sherab and several of the other porters headed down with Eric, while Ken, Jill, and I climbed toward a narrow saddle visible through the trees. We soon heard shouts from Sherab, and we bushwhacked down to where they were pointing excitedly to a rhododendron trunk emblazoned with the deep slash of an apche. The blaze indicated that other human
beings had traveled through here in the past. We continued through a tangle of magnolias, rhododendrons, and weeping pines, following other cuts which had been made in the trees until they petered out at the top of a 700-foot cliff dropping off into the Tsangpo.

  Somewhat disoriented, we traced the edge of the cliff and before long stumbled into a small clearing with the remains of a primitive shelter and a wooden rack for drying meat. The porters were overjoyed, for along with the fire-blackened rocks it was a sign that either Monpas or Lopas from Pemako had come here to hunt. Amid the porters’ excited talk of Pemako and the easy virtues of Lopa women, Gunn began to weep with relief, and went around shaking everyone’s hands. Sherab maintained that we had found the trail due to our Chod, or Dharma practice. Ken held that it was due to our having followed the tracks of the takin—what Kingdon Ward had referred to as the “mystical bovine of the bamboo forests.” Despite our dire circumstances in regard to food, Ken was vaguely disappointed. The forest and the surging river had entranced him, and the prospect of a route back to civilization was not altogether welcome.

  KINGDON WARD WROTE EVOCATIVELY of this section of the gorge. As the gorge grew ever narrower and the gradient steeper, “the power behind the maddened river was terrific . . . Its blows fell on rock and cliff with frightful force; and at every turn a huge cavernous mouth seemed to open, and gulp it down faster and faster. . . . Already we seemed to be far below the level of the ground, going down, down, into the interior of the earth . . . nothing seemed more unlikely than that we should ever reach civilization again. Every day the scene grew more savage; the mountains higher and steeper; the river more fast and furious.”