The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  Four hours from our campsite, the trail began to climb steeply along the side of a narrow canyon. Horse caravans passed us along the dizzying track, some carrying supplies for the Chinese army but most transporting cigarettes, liquor, and instant noodles for consumption in the Medok region. The Monpa horsemen had forsaken traditional clothing for Chinese military fatigues. Many carried guns.

  At 7 p.m., we arrived at Hami, a small military post 7,800 feet above sea level. Monpa traders spilled from surrounding shelters strung with blue and white striped plastic sheeting. Chinese soldiers appeared and insisted that we stay in a derelict building that they tried to pass off as a guesthouse. Damp, moth-eaten mattresses lay on top of rotting floorboards. Claiming allergies to mold (a bold if somewhat exaggerated performance by Oy), we convinced them to let us pitch our tents in a nearby field. Last year we had eaten a snake here, a black viper killed by the Chinese cook dispatched by Gunn’s Chengdu-based tour company. Tomorrow would be our last night on the trail, and we were as ambivalent as ever about the prospect of returning to civilization.

  Oy cataloged her orchids—the word derives from the latin orchus, which means testicle, she announced—while Gil informed us that he’d calculated that we had already climbed more than 75,000 feet over the course of our journey, two and a half times the height of Everest from sea level.

  The following morning, August 25, we headed out from Hami in heavy mists that soon dispersed into feeble sunshine and intermittent rain. The trail wound through a Tolkienesque forest of moss-covered rhododendrons. After eight hours of steady walking, we emerged into open marshland that snow and avalanche debris had covered the year before. Avoiding a cement shelter overflowing with crushed tin cans, we set up our tents on beds of flowering weeds at the base of a large boulder. The route over the Doshung-La wove up through a circle of snow peaks that rose behind us. It turned cold, the sky grew overcast, and it began to drizzle. As we ate our last supper in the hidden-land, our thoughts turned inward as we, each in our own way, tried to fathom the significance of the journey, its hardships as well as its joys, from Gunn’s incomprehension as to why Americans would spend so much money to suffer so inordinately in so remote a place to Hamid’s and my own speculations as to how the journey would help us secure passage into the innermost depths of the gorge. Throughout our journey, inner and outer experience had merged into a kind of dreamtime continuum in which familiar oppositions no longer pertained and anything seemed possible. Tibetans call it rochik, or one taste, and we suspected that it was the key to the deeper reaches, and meanings, of the beyul.

  BEFORE DAWN ON THE MORNING of August 26, the porters cut boughs of juniper and heaved them onto a smoldering fire, sending columns of fragrant smoke into the shrouded sky. The year before we had crossed the Doshung-La on Sagadawa, the full moon in May commemorating the Buddha’s birth, death, and enlightenment. We’d come across a corpse frozen in the snow as well as a dead horse and the wreckage of a downed military helicopter. This year we began the ascent back out of Pemako in mist and rain. Avalanches echoed from surrounding slopes as we wound our way through dwarf rhododendrons, ghostly rocks, and windswept snowfields. At the top of the pass, we followed Tibetan custom and left bits of our clothing or obsolete possessions on a cairn of stones marking the gateway out of Pemako.

  As we descended from the pass, we looked back toward the fluted snow peaks that guard this hidden-land, a place of infinite promise for both pilgrims and explorers. Already, the ridge we had just crossed, the snowy flanks of the goddess, was veiled in impenetrable mist.

  We followed switchbacks through a dense forest until late in the day, when we emerged from the trees and saw the Tsangpo flowing placidly in the distance at the base of bare, rocky hills. We climbed down through the pines to Pe-Doshung, a Tibetan village near the banks of the Tsangpo and the site of a small police station where our drivers had been waiting for us for days.

  Gunn was excited that we had spanned the Great Bend, rising in altitude from a little more than 2, 0 0 0 feet where the Tsangpo flows beneath the liberation bridge to more than 10,000 feet at Pe-Doshung. “The Chinese can build a great hydroelectric station here,” Gunn announced enthusiastically. “It would be much greater than the Three Gorges project on the Yangtse.”

  The local police displayed little interest when Gunn showed them our permits. They were overseeing a local funeral rite. Two friends or brothers—it wasn’t clear—had killed each other in a knife fight the night before we arrived. In observance of local custom, villagers were cutting up their bodies and throwing them into the Tsangpo, where they flowed downriver into the throat of Dorje Pagmo and the unknown parts of the gorge. Was this the only way to penetrate those uncharted depths?

  As we climbed into the jeeps, engines revving in the thin air and diesel fumes flooding through the cabin, Christiaan brooded on the image of bodies disappearing into the currents of the great river. “I guess the pilgrimage is over,” he said. But equally, it was beginning anew. I’d arrived where I had started from in 1993, and though we were now driving back toward Lhasa, the current of my life still pulled me downstream, to where I had watched the bodies flowing toward the undiscovered depths of the gorge, and the dream of a waterfall uniting earth and heaven.

  As we drove along the banks of the Tsangpo into the setting sun, I thought of a poem by the tenth-century Mahasiddha Naropa: The way of the Buddhas manifests as a great river.

  The dazzling display of unfulfilled desire,

  Samsara’s wave, of its own has passed away.

  PART FOUR

  THE WATERFALL

  When truly sought even the seeker cannot be found.

  Thereupon the goal of the seeking is attained, and

  the end of the search. At this point there is nothing

  more to be sought, and no need to seek anything.

  PADMASAMBHAVA

  The Book of the Great Liberation

  I reckon it is about 500 to 1 against falls, and I would lay it in guineas. . . . How the old chap who invented these infernal falls must chuckle in his grave when mugs like us go looking for them! And what a number of people have had a miserable time looking for this mythical marvel!

  THE EARL OF CAWDOR

  Journal entry for December 13, 1924

  The waters symbolize the universal sum of virtualities; they are fons et origo, “spring and origin,” the reservoir of all the possibilities of existence.

  MIRCEA ELIADE

  The Sacred and the Profane

  If you do not expect it, you will not find the unexpected.

  HERACLITUS

  October 1998

  The Year of the Earth Tiger

  IN 1924 , THE YEAR THAT KINGDON WARD journeyed into the Tsangpo gorges and declared the Falls of the Tsangpo a “religious myth,” a novelist and ex-ivory poacher named Talbot Mundy immortalized the waterfall in a work of fiction. Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley chronicles a disenchanted British civil servant’s journey to a hidden monastery overlooking “the tremendous Tsangpo Falls.” Emerging from a limestone tunnel beneath “a sheer wall of crags, whose edges pierced the sky,” the protagonist, Cottswold Ommony, confronts the legendary waterfall: . . . like a roaring curtain, emerald green and diamond white, blown in the wind, the Tsangpo River, half a mile wide, tumbled down a precipice between two outflung spurs that looked like the legs of a seated giant . . . their roar came down-wind like the thunder of creation. Below them, incalculably far below the summit, the rising spray formed a dazzling rainbow; and where, below the falls, the Tsangpo became the Brahmaputra, there were rock-staked rapids more than two miles wide that threw columns of white water fifty feet in air, so that the rocks looked like leviathans at war.

  At once an adventure story, a critique of British imperialism, and a treatise on Buddhist philosophy, Talbot Mundy’s novel centers on a sequestered monastery where
treasures of East and West have been preserved for posterity. Perched against cliffs at a height so high it “made the senses reel,” the monastery is filled with Chinese carpets, Ming vases, paintings, and silk curtains “as perfect in material as craftsmanship could contrive.” Infused with theosophical musings drawn from the teachings of the Russian clairvoyant Madame Blavatsky, Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley focuses on the quest for the Jade of the Ahbor, a supernatural stone whose radiance reveals the highest as well as the basest qualities of all who gaze upon it. The “jewel of pure perception,” the monolithic stone lies concealed in a hidden grotto behind the fabled Falls of the Tsangpo.

  Mundy’s descriptions of the topography of the Tsangpo gorge and the savage tribesmen who guard the valley “as cobras guard ancient ruins” drew on Bailey and Morshead’s well-publicized accounts. Reinvoking in art what explorers had ultimately dismissed as a romance of geography, Mundy’s novel envisions the lost waterfall “where rainbows dance” as the gateway to a paradisiacal sanctuary offering refuge from avarice and war. At the novel’s end, the high lama, Tsiang Samdup, leads Ommony down a rock-hewn staircase amid “the rush and roar of water pouring into hollow caverns.” They pass through an interminable tunnel that leads to the mystic stone in which one sees one’s “higher nature shining through the lower.” After parting prophecies concerning the fate of the world, the aged lama—a model for Father Perrault in Hilton’s Lost Horizon—vanishes into a limestone passageway behind the fabled waterfall while Ommony, his spiritual heir, stands before the stone with the “sensation of waiting on a threshold of a new world—waiting to be born.”

  Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley was a primary source for James Hilton’s “wild dream” of Shangri-La in the novel Lost Horizon, published less than a decade later, in 1933. Borrowing from another little-known work, a play called The Green Goddess written by William Archer in 1920,1 Hilton transposed the utopian realm from the Tsangpo gorge to northwestern Tibet where a hijacked government plane crashes with jaded British diplomat and ex-Oxford don Hugh Conway—and three mismatched companions. A Tibetan rescue party leads them over a high mountain pass to a monastery built against cliffs overlooking an idyllic valley. Shangri-La’s library and salons overflow with great works of art, literature, and music, preserved, says the 250-year-old Capuchin who founded the monastery, for a time when “men, exultant in the technique of homicide, would rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing will be in danger.”

  Father Perrault espouses a doctrine of moderation based on Christian and Buddhist values and foresees a time when there “will be no safety in arms, no help from authority, no answer in science.” At that time, the “lost and legendary treasures” preserved in Shangri-La will fuel “a new Renaissance.” Father Perrault bequeaths his legacy to Conway, who conceives of Shangri-La as “a living essence, distilled from the magic of the ages and miraculously preserved against time and death.”

  The mystical romanticism embodied in Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley and Lost Horizon originated with eighteenth-century reports by Tibet’s first Jesuit missionaries—the inspiration for Shangri-La’s and the Ahbor Valley’s presiding abbots. Physical inaccessibility, diplomatic isolation, and fantastic legends of levitating monks and precious jewels transformed Tibet in popular imagination to a land of compelling mystery. Figures such as Francis Younghusband, one of the last great imperial adventurers, returned from Tibet in the early years of the twentieth century to promote interfaith dialogue, envisioning, decades before Hilton, a realm where Eastern mysticism and Western pragmatism could merge into a new paradigm. The legacy of these hopes lives on in Western imagination, as strongly as Tibetan belief in a Buddhist Pure Land in the heart of the Tsangpo gorges—a place that Kingdon Ward, the last explorer to look for the falls, described as “hidden behind misty barriers where ordinary men do not go.”

  THE WESTERN SEARCH for the Falls of the Tsangpo in the first decades of the twentieth century paralleled a growing disillusionment with imperialism and an increasing interest in Eastern thought. During the period between the First and Second World Wars, books such as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, published in 1927, and Alexandra David Neal’s Magic and Mystery in Tibet were great successes, and Tibet transformed in the popular imagination into a realm of timeless wisdom. Om: The Secret of Ahbor Valley and Lost Horizon (the first book ever printed in paperback) placed these transcendental ideals in the context of a utopian geography and gave birth to the modern notion of a paradisiacal Himalayan realm conforming less to the actuality of Tibet’s landscape or culture than to the reality of Western fantasies.

  Hilton described Shangri-La as a place “strange and half incredible,” a place “touched with mystery . . . the whole atmosphere more of wisdom than philosophy,” where a monastic elite had discovered the key to longevity through esoteric breathing regimens and purple berries with mild narcotic properties. A storehouse of sacred wisdom and the greatest achievements of both Eastern and Western civilization, the sequestered valley was presented as a source of light and illumination in an age of impending darkness. Even the president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was seduced, naming his Maryland hideaway (what is now Camp David) Shangri-La. Shangri-La had its Hollywood apotheosis in Frank Capra’s 1937 film version of Lost Horizon starring Ronald Colman and Jane Wyatt. In one scene, the two lead actors swim in an Edenic lake fed by a sixty-foot sinuous waterfall—actually located in Tahquitz Canyon in Palm Springs, California.

  Closing the Gap

  IN 1993, KEN STORM AND I had penetrated no deeper into the Tsangpo’s innermost gorge than Kingdon Ward had in 1924.

  Lured by the prospect of the seventy-five waterfalls described in the Buddhist texts at the monastery at Pemakochung, Kingdon Ward and Cawdor had climbed out of the upper gorge at the Banks of Rubicon and, two weeks later, entered it again below the impenetrable chasm. “We had only one object in coming here,” Kingdon Ward wrote, “to explore that part of the gorge which had been hidden from us. . . . Here if anywhere were the ‘Falls of the Brahmaputra’ which had been a geographical mystery for half a century; and the final solution—falls? or no falls?—was now within our grasp.”

  They descended to river level at a point where the Tsangpo “after hurling itself through the gap, rushes headlong into a gorge so deep and narrow that one could hardly see any sky overhead.” The Tsangpo narrowed there to less than thirty yards across and poured over a ledge approximately forty feet high. Kingdon Ward measured the altitude by boiling point and found it to be 5,751 feet: 1,347 feet lower than their camp above Rainbow Falls. Unable to proceed farther upriver, Kingdon Ward determined that the forty-foot pour over was the highest falls that would ever be found on the Tsangpo. He and Cawdor returned to London and reported to the Royal Geographical Society that: “We are . . . unable to believe that there is any likelihood of a greater fall in the remaining 5 miles which we did not see.” For his efforts Kingdon Ward was awarded the Society’s Gold Medal of Exploration and effectively ended the search for “a falls of 100 feet or more” in the still unknown depths of the Tsangpo gorge. Lord Cawdor had written in his journal on December 13, 1924, of the futility of their quest:

  How the old chap who invented these infernal falls must chuckle in his grave when mugs like us go looking for them! And what a number of people have had a miserable time looking for this mythical marvel!

  Since Kingdon Ward’s expedition, the Falls of the Tsangpo had shifted, by general consensus, from the realm of fact to that of fiction, but the Five-Mile Gap that Kingdon Ward and Cawdor had left unexplored still remained “one of the last remaining secret places of the earth,” as Bailey described it in 1913. After our journey in 1993, Ken and I had resolved to return and definitively explore the unknown tract. The possibility of a waterfall on the Tsangpo of “a hundred feet or more” still did not seem altogether impossible.

  IN AUGUST 1993, three months after my first journey in
to the gorge, I met with David Breashears at Lily’s Restaurant in the Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington Avenue in New York City. In the mural-filled interior, he showed me slides he had taken with a telephoto lens of a section of the Tsangpo below Rainbow Falls. Shot from a vantage point thousands of feet above the river, Breashears’s photographs revealed a wildly turbulent river flowing through a narrow canyon hemmed in by towering walls of rock. In the depths of the abyss was what had looked to him like the crest of a surging waterfall, but intervening cliffs had prevented him from descending lower and he had not considered it significant enough to report to National Geographic. Although his IMAX work on Everest would mean putting it off for at least two years, Breashears proposed a full-scale climbing expedition to reach the hydrolic event that he had viewed through his binoculars and telephoto lens. Afterward, he wanted to push through the Five-Mile Gap. I was equally set on exploring this unknown region, but I wanted to experience it on different terms. In accordance with Chonyi Rinpoche’s counsel that ascending the heights of Kundu Dorsempotrang would reveal the key to Pemako’s innermost depths, I put off the search for the waterfall until after I had traveled to the sacred mountain.