The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  We then entered a narrow ravine gouged by landslides and climbed steeply into mist-filled forests. Yonten referred to the narrowing gorge as the ne-go, or gateway, to the inner beyul. The neyigs compare the surrounding mountains to “a fence of swords, rice stalks, crystal stupas, the manes of demonesses, breasts of dakinis, kings on thrones, and swords piercing into space.” But the mist and tall bamboo prevented us from seeing all but a narrow circumference. For hours, we hauled ourselves up along the streambed of the narrow gorge, rocks tumbling down from the slopes above.

  The porters stopped to build a fire and eat tsampa beneath an overhanging rock that Yonten called Drakartrodzong. Yonten had said it would be a long day and we continued on ahead in mist and rain. The gorge steepened and landslides had cut large swathes through the forest, whole sections of which had slid into the mud-filled river. The deadfall and unstable gray rubble that had been left behind was saturated with water. Sheered, splintered bamboo stuck up out of the mud like spears. We moved across the eroding slopes as quickly as possible in the pouring rain.

  I passed four Sherpas who had been walking in front of me and continued on to a recent mudslide that looked like gray, molten lava. I climbed to the top of the slide and descended on the other side to the original trail, where I caught sight of several porters in the mists ahead of me. Suddenly—at a point where the trail disappeared into yet another landslide chute—I lost sight of them, as well as where the trail continued. I finally found it lower down where it disappeared into jungle, but there were no footprints or broken branches indicating that the porters, or anyone else, had come this way. I was disturbed that the Sherpas were so far ahead when it was 4:30 p.m. with no sign of Yonten or the other porters behind us. To my relief, Hamid, the Gillenwaters, Oy, and Christiaan appeared behind me, together with Pemba. Nobody seemed to know who was in front and who was behind. Confusion and disagreement reigned as to whether to go on or to wait for the porters who were still behind. But we believed that the porters with our tents and sleeping bags were the ones still ahead of us, and we were eager to catch up.

  I followed Pemba up the trail until we found footprints and then proceeded across treacherous landslides until we regained the original trail by ascending a short, vegetated cliff. Christiaan and the others were behind, traversing a steep eroding mass of unstable rocks and tree roots protruding from gray mud.

  I turned around when I heard Gil yell, “Man down! We’ve got a man down!”

  The ground beneath Christiaan’s feet had given way and he’d somersaulted toward the river, pitching headfirst into a rock. Gil rushed down to where he was lying in the mud, dazed but lucid. In addition to the injury to his skull, his hand was bleeding and badly bruised. He’d broken his watch and the small compass fixed to its band. Troy checked his pupils for signs of a possible concussion. Unable to resist a joke, Christiaan terrified Troy by calling out wildly, “Who am I? What’s my name?” A moment later Hamid yelled, “Rocks! Look out, rocks!” and Christiaan and the Gillenwaters darted out of the way of a cascade of falling boulders. They slowly climbed back up to the trail in the rain. Christiaan may not have had a concussion, but he was soaked to the bone and caked with mud, and he looked like an initiate in a New Guinea mud dance.

  We continued on up the ravine. Gunn and the Chinese police officer caught up with us in the gathering dusk and reported that some of the porters were following behind them, but that others had stopped to carve out sleeping platforms from the side of the gorge.

  As we climbed higher, the terrain became progressively wilder and steeper. Our steps loosened the mud conglomerate and sent it hurtling down into the stream below. Hauling ourselves up on thin bamboo saplings, we eventually caught up with two of the Sherpas. Apparently they had thought that we were ahead of them and were trying to keep pace. Two more were farther ahead, they said, also trying to catch up. Clearly the protector spirits were at work to disorient us.

  AS IT TURNED OUT, the four Sherpas were carrying neither tents nor sleeping bags. They had traded their loads for food supplies that they feared the local porters might otherwise pilfer. It was too late to return the way we had come, and we had no choice but to stay where we were and hope that some of the porters would soon appear. It had been raining off and on all day and the ground was saturated with leeches.

  Pemba set about chopping down glassy-stemmed rhododendrons to rig a makeshift shelter with the plastic sheets that had been covering the Sherpas’ bamboo pack baskets. One of the other Sherpas began making a fire, initially with little success. At 8 p.m., Lhakpa, one of the younger Sherpas, appeared out of the mist with news that the porters who had been behind us had turned back at the landslide where Christiaan had fallen. Lhakpa claimed to have made it in less than an hour from where Yonten and the rest of our party had set up camp. But no one wanted to make that descent in the dark.

  The fire hadn’t taken, and suddenly I began to shiver. The clothes I had with me were soaked through, and I decided to descend with Lhakpa to the lower camp. The fewer of us there were at our makeshift bivouac, the more chance that the night would be bearable for those who did stay. I relinquished my poncho as a ground sheet and left with Lhakpa at 8:20 p.m.

  In the gathering darkness we made fast progress through the tangled ravines, landslides, and uprooted trees. Lhakpa was sure-footed, but I slid and tumbled frequently, nearly impaling myself on the rhododendron and bamboo stalks that had been sheared off by the mudslides. One to two feet in height and an inch or less in diameter, they stuck up out of the ground like small spears.

  We reached camp after 9 p.m. The porters had rigged simple shelters from tarpaulins and the plastic sheets that covered their loads. The Sherpas had used the dining tent as a fly and suspended it between moss-encrusted rhododendrons. In heavy rain, I pitched my tent on a rough framework of tree limbs that one of the Sherpas had suspended over the mountainside. I emptied the water from my boots, deleeched, and spent the night in fitful sleep, unable to banish the thought that my precarious shelter might wash into the stream below.

  A Treatise on Paradise

  AS EARLY AS 5 0 c.e. , the theologian Philo cautioned against a literal interpretation of the Garden of Eden, writing, “To think that it here meant that God planted vines, or olive trees, or apple trees, or pomegranates, and any trees of such kinds, is mere incurable folly.”12 The fourth-century Christian thinker St. Ephraem, in his Hymns on Paradise, similarly cautioned that, “It is with the eye of the mind that I saw paradise . . .”

  But theologians who argued for a symbolic reading of “the divine garden” remained a distinct minority. St. Augustine registered the conflicting points of view. “Some interpret [Paradise] in an exclusively corporeal sense,” he wrote. Others give it “an exclusively spiritual meaning,” and still others take it in both senses, “sometimes corporeally and at other times spiritually . . .”13 St. Augustine personally favored the literal reading, and shaped the convictions of later generations of Christian theologians who maintained that the earthly paradise had not disappeared, but had only become inaccessible as a result of mankind’s fall from grace.

  Centuries later, in 1617, John Salkeld synthesized prevailing views on the reality of the Garden of Eden in his work A Treatise on Paradise and the Principle Contents Thereof. Relying on theological authorities such as St. Augustine, Salkeld set out to prove that the earthly paradise was “a real and corporeal place” and not merely metaphysical. Catholic dogma at the time supported the same literalist point of view, insisting that descriptions of Paradise were “not allegory but history.” John Calvin, the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer, similarly declared that the Garden of Eden was “situated on the Earth, not as some dream in the air.”

  In the fifth century St. Augustine admitted that, “It is probable that man has no idea where Paradise was.” Medieval geographers located the lost garden everywhere from the North Pole to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, althou
gh the prevailing Church view held that the earthly paradise lay “in the east,” in the regions of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers or in the farthest reaches of Asia, at a great height so as to have been unaffected by the waters of the flood. Like Yangsang, the terrestrial paradise was described as a place of eternal spring, neither hot nor cold and filled with fruit-bearing trees and healing waters. Early in the eighth century, St. John Damascene wrote that Eden “was temperate in climate and bright with the softest and purest of air. It was luxurient with ever-blooming plants, filled with fragrances, flooded with light, and surpassing all conception of sensible fairness and beauty.”14

  Throughout the Middle Ages and into the Reformation, the Vatican dispatched friars into the depths of Asia in pursuit of Eden, hoping to discover vestiges of the vanished Paradise. After all efforts had proved futile, St. Thomas Aquinas maintained that: The situation of Paradise is shut off

  from the habitable world by mountains, or seas,

  or some torrid region, which cannot be crossed;

  and so people who have written about

  topography make no mention of it.15

  In the fourteenth century, Sir John Mandeville made an even stronger case for Eden’s inaccessibility. He wrote that “wastes and wilderness and great crags and mountains” surround the earthly paradise. Of those who had tried to follow the raging rivers leading into Eden, “some had died through exhaustion . . . some went blind and deaf through the noise of the waters, and some were drowned through the violence of the waves.”16 Even with advances in cartography in the fifteenth century, beliefs regarding the story of Genesis remained tenacious. The Garden of Eden appeared consistently on maps at the eastern edge of India, where it was shown as being separated from the rest of the earth by an impenetrable wall, not unlike that of the Himalayas.

  Pemako enjoys many of the attributes of the lost Eden—a promised land east of India sealed in by towering mountains and hazardous terrain, duplicitous serpents and magical flora somewhere at its heart.17

  John Salkeld’s early-seventeenth-century Treatise on Paradise explained why such promised lands can rarely be reached: What may be the reason why Paradise was never found? Why, it was the hugeness and insuperable height of the mountains, which are betwixt us and Paradise, secondly, for that there be mightie wilderness full of all kind of most venomous sepents and wild beasts. Thirdly, because there is no way but through large regions of most pestiferous aire in which no man can live.18

  The belief in a geographical paradise persisted widely until the end of the seventeenth century when the Church conveniently declared that the Garden had been erased from the surface of the planet by the Great Flood. The question then remained not where Paradise lay, but what it meant. Although the expulsion from Paradise is the core western myth, the notion of the fall was a later accretion. At the end of the second century, Christian writings by St. Theophilas of Antioch and St. Irenaeus reveal an understanding of the story of Genesis prior to the invention of original sin. According to these erudite bishops, Eden was “a means of advancement” for “maturing and becoming perfect.” The eating of the fruit of knowledge did not condemn humankind to suffering, but the act of disobedience ultimately furthered its maturity and capacity to perfect itself. Eden was thus not so much a perfect place, but a place where being could be perfected. Mankind’s departure from the enclosing walls of Paradise and its bucolic luxuries led the first couple to become all that they could be. As the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote in 1785, it was a necessary transition from an unreflective, animal state to one of full humanity. Freedom, he suggested, begins when the nostalgia for a perfect place ends and one embraces the present moment.

  Nonetheless, Paradise persisted as a perennial dream and an incentive to geographical discovery. The religious dissidents who abandoned a repressive Europe for North America discovered what seemed a blessed land, where history could begin anew. They described New England as being “like the Garden of Eden, a new Eden.” In a more literal sense, when Columbus sailed close to the isthmus of the Orinoco in South America, he believed he had discovered one of the four rivers that issue from Eden. As he wrote to Queen Isabella of Spain during his third expedition, “I believe that the earthly paradise lies here . . . which no man can enter except by God’s leave.”

  The belief in Eden, the widespread conviction of an impending apocalypse, and the desire for gold and fortune led to voyages of discovery in which explorers saw in the lands that opened before them the shape of a lost paradise. Following Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci (1499-1502) surveyed the coast of Surinam and Brazil and wrote that: “If the earthy paradise exists anywhere on earth, I think it must not be very far from this area.”19 Yet as D. H. Lawrence recognized, to believe in Paradise was to consign oneself to Purgatory, to be forever seeking something beyond the horizon, beyond life itself. “Why pin ourselves down on a paradisal ideal?” he wrote in 1953. “It is only ourselves we torture. . . . Love is never a fulfillment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss. There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss.”20

  Hell Night

  THE NEXT MORNING, after climbing an hour and a half above our precarious camp, I caught up with Hamid, Oy, Christiaan, and the Gillenwaters. They had rigged up a perfunctory fly to shield them from the rain, but the night had been hell. Hamid had screamed out in the middle of the night when he discovered that a bloated tiger leech had fixed itself to the inside of his mouth. Rallying to the crisis, Gil had produced a lighter and as Hamid—wild-eyed—held down his lower lip, Gil carefully scorched the leech, bursting its contents of human blood. No one quite managed to sleep after this nightmare.

  As we stomped around the fire trying to warm our feet and stay out of the rain, Christiaan said that the time since we had left the river had probably been the most confounding twenty-four hours in his entire life. “Maybe we aren’t wanted here,” he mused. “Perhaps some ‘wrathful force’ is trying to tell us something.”

  Hamid told Christiaan about the year before when we had crossed the Gawalung-La and our Chinese porters had been caught beneath collapsing snow cornices. “The guardian spirits are compassionate,” he tried to convince him. “They only keep out those they feel are harmful to the land. If they don’t want you here, they’ll first try to manipulate your thoughts and dreams. Only if that fails,” Hamid insisted, “will they resort to unleashing avalanches and rock falls to keep you out.”

  “Or molest you with leeches,” Christiaan countered. “It’s hard to accept that we’re on the edge of some paradise. This seems more like hell.”

  “In Tantra, hell is paradise,” Hamid said, thinking perhaps of Padmasambhava’s words that “adverse conditions are a practitioner’s true wealth.”

  THE FIRE WAS STILL SMOLDERING , and the Monpa porters took the opportunity to cook their midmorning rice. “These Monpas stop five times a day to eat,” Pemba reflected. “Tea, tsampa, chiles, bear meat in the morning; then rice or corn gruel in the middle of the day; more tsampa or bread in the afternoon; tea, and bear meat in the evening; and before sleeping, another big bowl of tsampa. They’ll run out of food at this rate.”

  We left ahead of the Monpas and proceeded up the gorge, eventually crossing over on a fallen log to the left bank of the river. The trail began to contour westward, and we crossed two smaller streams on moss-slick trees. Bhakha Tulku had told me stories of the many pilgrims who had lost their lives while crossing Pemako’s notorious tree bridges. They’re serviceable so long as they’re covered in bark. When it wears off, the logs become perilously smooth. It is safest to cross them barefoot, he had advised.

  Deep sphagnum mosses carpeted the forest floor. “It’s like an elfin realm,” Oy exclaimed. We walked through stands of moss-clad fir trees and evergreen oaks and drank from crystalline rivulets, as the Monpas gathered a variety of mushrooms that they insisted were edible. The increasingly strangely
behaved nun, Ani-la, pulled leaves from plants along the trail and stuffed them in her mouth. Yonten warned of the bears that frequent these forests. “The tigers won’t bother us,” Yonten said, “but the bears may come after our food.”

  Troy told of how he’d once woken up in the Arizona desert with a mountain lion gazing down at him from a nearby rock. “I don’t know why he didn’t kill me.”

  “He probably saw you were peaceful,” Oy said. “In Thailand many monks befriend tigers during their forest walkabouts.” She herself had had several close encounters, one while napping beneath a tree. When she awoke there were three tigers playing a short distance in front of her. “It was one of the most magical moments of my life,” she said.

  All day we had been enveloped in mist and an endless expanse of pine trees, but at last we emerged out of the forest into an open valley. Suddenly, as the mists parted, we could see huge, granite ramparts rising above us. For a moment there was even a patch of blue sky, but it vanished again as quickly as it had come. The trail was equally ephemeral and it often disappeared entirely. Happily we had climbed higher than the range of leeches.

  The Pungpung-La

  AT DUSK, WE REACHED A LARGE overhanging boulder surrounded by weathered prayer flags. Mantras had been carved into the rocks. An eerie light filtered through a stand of silver fir and a shallow cave offered partial shelter from the rain. Yonten called the place Gyayul, Realm of Victory, and said it was the door to Kundu Dorsempotrang. It was the first sign of any religious conception of the environment since we had left Samdrup. The trail for the past two days had been so faint that at times we had doubted whether it was more than an animal track. But now at our first né, or portal to inner Pemako, the preceeding two days seemed a passage through the outer rim of a mandala—a disorienting trial to test our resolve. The altimeter showed 11,760 feet.