The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  I returned to the Tsangpo gorges in May of 1996, eight months after the journey to Kundu. To ward off competition, Ken Storm had told an interviewer from Outside magazine that a full traverse of the Tsangpo’s innermost gorge “would require an army of explorers with big-wall climbing experience and massive river support,” but simultaneously we were planning a far simpler expedition. I enlisted the support of my brother Ralph Rynning, who was born in Norway and whose zeal for mountaineering led to a forty-two-day crossing of the Patagonian icecap in the footsteps of the legendary explorer Eric Shipton. Enterprising in other ways too, he arranged to finance his trip by excavating a rock from the bottom of the gorge and selling it to a Swiss geologist at the Zurich Institute of Geology.

  Ralph, Ken, Hamid, and I planned to follow the route that Kingdon Ward and Lord Cawdor had pioneered in 1925 when they reentered the gorge from the north. From the forty-foot falls that Kingdon Ward had determined to be the highest on the Tsangpo, we intended to continue upriver with climbing gear into the section of the gorge that Kingdon Ward and Cawdor had not seen. Hamid and I trained on limestone cliffs at the edge of the Kathmandu valley. Ken reacquainted himself with rappelling and jumar work at his island retreat in northern Ontario. Hearing of our intentions, Gunn deputed a Chinese colleague in his stead. “I have had enough of Pemako,” he told me over a crackly phone line from Chengdu.

  On the drive in from Lhasa, we ran into a band of British plant collectors who had extended Kingdon Ward’s work into the Powo region and several passes leading toward Pemako. The team’s leader, Kenneth Cox, came from a family of Scottish plant collectors and had distinguished himself as perhaps the world’s foremost authority on rhododendrons. He aspired to introduce plants to the British Isles that Kingdon Ward had discovered but whose seeds had not survived, as well as rhododendron species that Kingdon Ward had overlooked. He rattled off names like Rhododendron laudandum, Rhododendron bulu, Rhododendron cephalanthum, Rhododendron dignabile, and Podophyllum aurantiocaule. He hoped to draw attention to the botanical diversity of the Tsangpo gorges and to encourage its conservation. While sharing a meal in the town of Nyingtri, Kenneth revealed that the local police had placed them there under house arrest pending the arrival of their Chinese guide and travel permit. The roadside restaurant was as far as they were allowed to go.

  From the road head at Pelung, we crossed the footbridge and followed the Po Tsangpo River to its confluence with the Tsangpo. At Mondrong, a small village emerging out of fields of millet, we recruited Monpa hunters to lead us into the region of the gap. A village lama told us of caves that we would pass where yogins had meditated beneath the walls of Gyala Pelri. From Neythang, as he called it, a perilous descent would lead us to the cove that Kingdon Ward had reached in 1925. Sheer cliffs line the gorge, the lama told us, and no one had ever penetrated farther upriver. When we asked the lama about the texts from Pemakochung describing the seventy-five waterfalls reputed to cascade through the innermost gorge, he told us that thirty-five years before, the Chinese had forced him at gunpoint to throw all his scriptures into the Tsangpo. He had no recollection of that particular text and disclaimed any knowledge of the seventy-five waterfalls.

  Discouraged by the lama’s account, Hamid resolved to travel deeper into Pemako on his own and search for Buddhist texts that might have survived the Chinese predations. Following the Red Panda motto “confuse and elude,” we convinced Gunn’s replacement that he would be of the most service to us if he remained in Mondrong as we divided into two groups. Hamid enlisted a Lopa and his daughter to guide him downriver and carry his sleeping bag and a tarp. They crossed the Tsangpo on the bridge below Tsachu and, battling gnats and the occasional viper, headed south toward Luku, the village that Ken and I had visited after our passage through the gorge in 1993. Impressed by Hamid’s knowledge of Tibetan, a local lama urged him to cross the Tsangpo on a dizzying cable and to consult a colleague, a reincarnate lama in the village of Gande. In the archives of the small temple, Hamid discovered a text that described Pemako in terms of the five chakras of Dorje Pagmo. But apart from referring to the innermost gorge as the goddess’s throat, the manuscript offered no account of any waterfalls.

  Meanwhile Ken, Ralph, and I headed upriver from the confluence into the innermost gorge. Rather than descending to the Tsangpo where Kingdon Ward had, we continued on to Neythang, where the hunters led us to the meditation caves on the walls below Gyala Pelri. Herds of takin roamed the grassy plains below the caves, and the hunters killed three of them for food and stretched their hides on racks of bamboo. The area was also full of birds, many of which migrate up the gorge from India. Ralph had received partial funding from Cornell University’s Department of Ornithology to record the fire-tailed sunbirds, pygmy blue flycatchers, giant laughing thrushes, and other species that inhabit the area. Chinese sources had listed 232 species in Pemako and acknowledged that there were probably many more. According to our hunter guides, some of the birds sing mantras that can lead the attuned to Pemako’s secret realms.

  We continued over another pass, hoping to descend into the gap at a point higher upriver. But after a precipitous traverse across landslides and ice-choked gullies, we could find no way to reach the Tsangpo, let alone see down to its hidden depths. We retraced our steps and descended along the edge of a waterfall toward the small bay in the Tsangpo that Kingdon Ward had visited in 1925. On the climb down we nearly lost one of our porters as he tumbled thirty feet down a fern-drenched cliff. Lower still we reached a sheer 300-foot drop in the forest. We lowered ourselves inch by inch, hanging on to tree branches.

  As we approached Neygyap—the bay in the Tsangpo—the oldest of the hunters, Dungley Phuntsok, revealed that his grandfather had led two Britishers to the same spot more than seventy years ago. In an astounding display of oral history, he pointed with his bamboo stick to a shallow cave high above the Tsangpo where they had slept as they descended toward the river. He described their terrier and the small pistol that one of them had used to shoot two pheasants for their evening meal. He also pointed out accurately that one of them (Cawdor) had not made the final descent, but had waited behind on the narrow shelf of rock. (Kingdon Ward and Cawdor had named the precarious campsite Birdcage Walk.)

  Great plumes of spray arched above us as we reached the river. We traversed out on a spit of granite and gazed down at the thirty- to forty-foot cascade that Kingdon Ward had thought to be the highest waterfall that would ever be found on the length of the Tsangpo. Kingdon Ward had calculated that the river falls 1,700 feet in the eight miles from Rainbow Falls to Neygyap—a drop of more than 212 feet per mile. We pushed upstream, but as waves surged against the steep vegetated walls, it was clear that there was no way to cover the missing section on the Tsangpo’s left bank. The cliffs across the river looked equally sheer. As Kingdon Ward had noted in 1925, the only access to the area, if there was one at all, seemed to be from higher up on the right bank of the Tsangpo, and we would have to leave that for a future journey. The Five-Mile Gap remained, as it had for centuries, a place of inaccessible mystery.

  I RETURNED TO TIBET TWO MONTHS LATER and visited a mountain sanctuary north of Lhasa. As I sat on a limestone outcrop above a bubbling hot spring flowing with slender green snakes, a Tibetan woman with long dreadlocks and a thick woolen robe came down to the pool to bathe. Her name was Ani Rigsang, and she had lived for years in meditative retreat in a cave above the springs.2

  Toward the end of my stay at Terdrom, I invited Ani Rigsang to come with me to Gompo Né, a pilgrimage site marking the northern door into Pemako. Gompo Né lies near the confluence of the Po Tsangpo and Tsangpo rivers, a two-hour journey from the village of Mondrong. The texts describing the Tsangpo’s inner gorge may have vanished, the lama in Mondrong had told me, but he had suggested that clues to the area could be found by meditating at Gompo Né. If I had learned anything in Pemako, it was the limits of linear thought, and I had taken the lama’s advice to heart. />
  The Po Tsangpo had swollen in the summer rains, and vines and foliage grew lavishly along its banks. Faced with unrelenting leeches, two fellow pilgrims turned back at the outset and two more a day later as we approached the confluence. At Gompo Né, rock pinnacles worn smooth by floods rose from a small sandy plain. A circuitous pilgrims’ path led through tunnels and passed by dark springs. Adepts had left handprints in solid rock as signs of their passage; mantras and images of snakes had been carved into the granite walls. Flood waters of the Tsangpo had swept away a small temple that once sat amid the towering rocks.

  Ani Rigsang followed the lineage of Jatsun Nyingpo, the treasure-revealer who had uncovered the first Pemako neyig in the early seventeenth century. The revealed scroll had presented an exalted view of pilgrimage and Buddhist practice: “In any circumstances good or bad abandon all hope from Buddhas and give up all fears of suffering in Samsara. Recognize that hope and fear are the magical display of your own mind of Primordial Purity [kadak ] . . . . Remain in the state where there is neither perceiver nor object of perception. Let go into the immaculate space of Great Perfection . . . beyond meditation or distractive disturbance.”

  I later asked the dreadlocked nun to come with me the following summer, when, along with Hamid, I hoped to enter the gap from the ravines south of Namcha Barwa. We had learned of a bamboo rope bridge that spanned the Tsangpo several days’ walk below Luku, where Ken and I had emerged from the gorge in 1993. A remote hermitage called Mandeldem once lay on the other side, Bhakha Tulku told me. The eighteenth-century treasure-revealer Choeje Lingpa had reputedly set out from there on his search for Yangsang, crossing a pass into the unknown section of the Tsangpo gorge before passing away in the sunless jungles.

  Since returning from Kundu Dorsempotrang, I’d asked several lamas for their theories about Yangsang’s coordinates, and no two had the same perspective, though all insisted that, like the Tantric power places (pitha) of ancient India, Yangsang was no mere metaphor, but an actual place, albeit not strictly geographical. Some maintained that only the specific incarnations stipulated in Padmasambhava’s termas would be able to reveal it, but others claimed that was only another veil to protect Yangsang from outsiders.

  IN AUGUST 1997, Ani Rigsang came to the Yak Hotel in Lhasa where I had arrived with Hamid, Ken Storm, Gil and Troy Gillenwater, and two additional recruits who would help defray the cost of the expedition. Claire Scobie, an English journalist, had traveled the year before with the British plant collecters we had met in Nyingtri. Waltraut Ott, a German Buddhist, claimed to be seeing visions of Dorje Pagmo after a yearlong meditation retreat near Kathmandu. We drove to Bhakha monastery in Powo and set out the next day for the Su-La pass that leads into Pemako. I’d begun working with a new company in Lhasa, and our Tibetan guide, Nima, proved a loyal and dedicated ally, despite the fact that we had to carry him down the Su-La due to crippling knee pains. On the far side of the pass we entered the now-familiar dense, leech-filled jungles. It rained unrelentingly. “I can’t believe we’re doing this all over again,” Gil said.

  After a night at what they dubbed insect camp (more than 2,300 species of insects have been found in Pemako and a vast number of them had infested our tents), Gil and Troy had had enough; they were going to return to higher ground. We split our rations, and with two Sherpas to assist them they started up the Tsangpo to where they could cross by cable to the right bank. From there, they would trek upriver to the confluence that they had visited with Rick Fisher in 1994. Ken, Hamid, and I continued with Claire, Waltraut, and Ani Rigsang to a Lopa village called Chutanka from where we hoped to cross the Tsangpo and enter the valleys to the south of Namcha Barwa.

  Chutanka lies on a shelf of land thousands of feet above the Tsangpo River. The conical moss-clad peak that rises above the village makes it look from afar like the ancient Incan capital of Machu Picchu. Foregoing tents, we settled into a house and dried our clothes around a smoky fire. Sitting on skins of large white monkeys, Nima, Hamid, and I spoke with the Lopa headman about the route across the river. “No one has crossed the cable in years,” the headman said, sitting naked from the waist up; “the anchors are loose and rusty now.” In the past, people from his village had made pilgrimages to Choeje Lingpa’s hermitage at Mandeldem, but it had long since fallen into ruin. The valley was now the haunt of monkeys and lumbering takin that descend from the slopes of Namcha Barwa to drink from thermal springs at the base of the glaciers. “Even if the cable could be crossed,” the headman added, “the ravines beyond are impassible in summer; they’re infested with venomous snakes and trees that cause unbearable blisters if one brushes against them or rain drips on you from their leaves. No matter how much you paid us,” he said, “what good would it do if we died?” He told us of another cable several days downriver. “Maybe you can cross there,” he said.

  Ken was discouraged and decided to catch up with the Gillenwaters. He hoped to convince them to take a detour to the Shechen ridge, where they could look down into the Five-Mile Gap. Hamid and I held out, determined to try our luck at the next cable crossing.

  As we left Chutanka, we passed a circle of sharpened, head-high stakes that had been painted the color of blood and thrust into the earth above the village to harness the energies of local spirits. For two days we contoured along high paths above the Tsangpo, passing through scattered villages. At Druk, villagers told us that the cable there had also rusted and no one had crossed the Tsangpo in years. Even if the cable doesn’t break, the headman told us, no trails lead through the mountains on the far side of the river. Waltraut speculated that the villagers did know of a secret path leading to Mandeldem and to Yangsang, but would not tell us about it. Claire, a pragmatic journalist, said that Yangsang existed only in the mind, a will-o’-the-wisp, like the Tsangpo Falls, that receded as you approach it. I translated their comments to Ani Rigsang, who laughed and continued eating the wild grapes that grew along the trail.

  We’d reached an impasse. It was too late to retrace our steps and follow the route north toward the confluence and the ridge above the Five-Mile Gap. We resigned ourselves to trekking down the lower Tsangpo gorge, retracing the route that Kinthup had followed in 1882 during his clandestine attempt to follow the river into India.

  As we continued down the slopes of the gorge, side streams spilled from dense jungle and transformed into waterfalls that plunged into the Tsangpo. At one silvery cascade overhung with subtropical foliage, naked children bathed in the spray amid peals of laughter. As we approached, they scampered through the rocks and water and disappeared like sprites. The sun tilted through the vine-strung trees at the top of the falls and formed halos in the cascading water.

  IN 1982, AS I PREPARED FOR MY STUDY of sacred landscapes in Sikkim, the anthropologist Dr. Michael Harner told me of his experiences among the Jívaro Indians in the Amazonian rain forests of eastern Ecuador. The Jívaros’ principal initiation rites occur in the spaces behind waterfalls, Dr. Harner told me. Holding a balsa wood staff, the shaman crosses back and forth between the translucent curtain of water flowing on one side and the solid rock wall on the other, the cacophonous roar of the cascading water (and often the combined use of decoctions of the hallucinogenic vine Banisteriopsis caapi) leading him into an altered state of consciousness.3 I learned of similar initiatory rites that take place in Haiti, where white-robed Vodoun initiates descend a limestone escarpment and enter the waterfall of Saut d’Eau where a serpent deity held to be the repository of wisdom offers renewal and transformation amid the thundering waters.4 In Japan, adherents of the Shugendo sect stand under icy waterfalls to assimilate the energies they believe to pervade the entire universe, while African chieftains placated their gods by throwing offerings over the brink of the 355-foot high Mosi-oa-Tunya, the Smoke That Thunders, that David Livingstone renamed Victoria Falls when he “discovered” it in 1855.

  Even animals experience the awe of waterfalls: a noted animal behaviorist des
cribed the journey of a solitary chimpanzee to a waterfall in East Africa, “evidently for the sheer pleasure of communing with it.”5

  WE CONTINUED DOWN THE TSANGPO and crossed again over the Doshung-La pass. Chinese police officers met us on the other side and escorted us to the Public Security Bureau in Bayi, where we discovered that Ken Storm and the Gillenwaters had been arrested for deviating from the stated itinerary. Bayi’s head detective, Tashi, who had recovered some of our stolen belongings in 1994 and had requested a “prize,” was still there. The gaudy plaque that Hamid and I had brought him in 1996 still hung from the office wall. Tashi was dressed, as usual, in a trenchcoat and a fedora. In our past dealings with him he had been friendly, if odd, but on this occasion his Chinese superiors were present, and he acted accordingly. Translating their demands, he asked that we hand over all our film and he forced Hamid to read aloud from Claire’s journal. Gil’s Tibet guidebook contained a foreword by the Dalai Lama, and the police confiscated it as a subversive document. They examined Ken’s video footage at length and expressed disappointment when it revealed no more than images of mountains and rivers. Through sleight of hand, we managed to conceal most of our film. I pushed in the tails of several unexposed slide rolls and passed it off as film that I had shot on the trail. I could not resist asking what the chief detective thought I could possibly have taken pictures of that would be strategically sensitive; U.S. satellites can secure much better images of bridges than I can with my camera, I assured him.