by Ian Baker
“Yes,” he said triumphantly, “but not the underside of bridges.”
After writing obligatory “self-criticism” letters for having broken the laws of China and promising to honor Tashi’s request to bring him a video of The Godfather when we next returned, we piled into the jeeps and headed for Lhasa. That night at a roadside restaurant Ken, Gil, and Troy related their experience. After crossing to the west bank of the Tsangpo, they’d learned of a hunters’ trail that winds along a knife-edge ridge to Shechen-La. They’d followed it until the weather opened and they gazed out over the glacier-covered peaks of Namcha Barwa and Gyala Pelri and down into the dizzying depths of the Five-Mile Gap. With the aid of a local hunter whom they had met in the mists, they descended lower and reached a point high above the Tsangpo where they could look downriver toward the crest of the hydrolic feature that David Breashears had photographed from a similar vantage point in 1993. Beyond that point the Tsangpo disappeared from view, but the plumes of spray suggested the presence of a large waterfall. Intervening cliffs prevented them from descending closer.
Gil and Troy had tried to see into the gap from the north on their expedition with Rick Fisher in May 1994. After their aborted raft trip farther up the Tsangpo, they had trekked down to the confluence. Rick had read about the seventy-five waterfalls described in Kingdon Ward’s book, Gil said. They’d followed a trail above the village of Mondrong, and in an article in Men’s Journal in September 1994, Rick claimed to have seen into the innermost sections of the gorge. “There were no waterfalls!” he had declared. Gil clarified that they had followed the trail for no more than a few hours and hadn’t even gone far enough to see the river, let alone its hidden depths. On this occasion they’d seen only a small portion of the Tsangpo from the Shechen-La, but had been tantalized by the sight of the foaming cataract where it disappeared around a headwall and entered the Five-Mile Gap. We looked repeatedly at the video footage that Ken had shot and, over dinner in Tsedang, agreed to go back together to the gorge in October 1998 to investigate more closely.
On the Trail of the Takin
IN THE WINTER OF 1998, in the first days of the Tibetan Year of the Earth Tiger, I traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to meet with Hamid and Robert Gardner, the founder and director of the Film Study Center at Harvard University. In 1990, a year before beginning his doctoral program at Harvard, Hamid completed a yearlong course at the Anthropology Film Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Robert Gardner’s lyrical film on ritual warfare among the Dugum Dani tribe in New Guinea (Dead Birds, 1964) and his cinematic essay on the cremation ghats in Benaras, India (Forest of Bliss, 1984) had left lasting impressions, and Gardner, in his turn, had been intrigued by Hamid’s accounts of the Buddhist hunters of the Tsangpo gorge. Gardner had agreed to partly finance a film that Hamid and I would help direct. Gardner had recruited an award-winning cinematographer named Ned Johnston who joined us in Cambridge.
Hamid and I told the seasoned filmmakers what we knew about the Pemako hunters’ quest for takin, the horned blue-eyed ruminants they believe Padmasambhava placed in the gorges for their benefit. According to the hunters’ stories, the takins’ life force travels at death through an aperature in one of their horns to Chimé Yangsang Né, Pemako’s Secret Place of Immortality. Legends abound in Pemako of hunters who have followed their tracks into the mystic sanctuary. As they never return, the way is lost to all who would follow.
Hamid spoke eloquently of the importance of documenting the Tsangpo hunters’ vanishing way of life and exploring their beliefs that link the quest for game with a spiritual search. The film should invoke the hunters’ sense of living at the threshold of another world, Hamid argued.
Gardner’s groundbreaking films had been made with minimal or no narration. Forest of Bliss unfolds without commentary, subtitles, or dialogue and offers a magnified sense of participation in ceremonies, rituals, and vocations associated with death and regeneration. Dead Birds focuses on a Stone Age society in the highlands of West Irian living an isolated existence based on inter-tribal warfare between neighboring clans. As Gardner described the making of the film, “Certain kinds of behavior were followed, never directed. . . . It was an attempt to see people from within and to wonder, when the selected fragments of that life were assembled, if they might speak not only of the Dani but also of ourselves.”
We hoped that the film on the hunters of the Tsangpo gorge would have a similar allegorical dimension. When Frank Capra induced Columbia Pictures to buy the film rights to Lost Horizon, he allegedly claimed that the story “held a mirror up to the thoughts of every human being on earth.” We felt that the hunters’ quest for an idealized realm ever beyond the horizon spoke of the same universal longings.
During the two years that Hamid lived in Kathmandu, he created a powerful film about the masked dances of Harisiddhi, a temple on the edges of the Kathmandu valley that’s still rumored to practice human sacrifice. Gardner urged that Hamid take charge of sound for the film on the Tsangpo gorge and that we both assist Ned in shaping its themes—from the preparation for the hunt to the quest for Yangsang. If Yangsang could not be found literally, we would try to evoke it through art.
WHEN WE LEFT FOR TIBET in May of 1998 , we planned to film the takin hunt in the area of Neythang which Ken Storm, Ralph Rynning, and I had visited in 1996. Hamid had traveled alone that year to Bayu, where he spent the night in the home of a Khampa hunter named Tsering Dondrup whose brother, the local lama, had directed him across the Tsangpo to the texts explicating Dorje Pagmo’s five chakras. By chance, we ran into Tsering at the trailhead in Pelung, where he was attending a local festival and drinking large quantities of chang. Hamid told him of our intention to film takin in Neythang.
“Don’t go to Neythang!” Tsering said in drunken enthusiasm, “I’ll show you where there are more takin in the valleys above Bayu.”
In Tibetan deeply inflected by the local dialect, Tsering claimed that as the snow begins to melt on the high passes, the takin migrate out of the deepest section of the gorge where they shelter in caves during the winter. When Hamid and I pressed him, Tsering told us of a network of takin trails through the area that Kingdon Ward had referred to as a “forbidden land.” This was a revelation to us: it shattered the long-standing myth of the inaccessibility of the Tsangpo’s innermost gorge. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, Tibetans had categorically denied any knowledge of the legendary gap, but now Tsering, lucid with chang, began to name the caves and rock shelters where he and other hunters slept on their hunting expeditions into the world’s deepest gorge. As he described an improbable route through precipitous jungles and across towering, moss-covered cliffs, our excitement mounted. If he was to be believed, the Himalayas’ ultimate terra incognita was in fact its best-kept secret.
We hired Tsering on the spot and began the trek down toward the confluence. As we followed the gallery of bridges down the Po Tsangpo River, Tsering described the game trails into the depths of the gorge that the takin forge during their spring migrations. I scribbled the names of the various sites in my notebook: Benchi Pagmo, Zadem, Hugudurung—remote outposts reclaimed by jungle in the months when the stinging nettles, bamboo, and underbrush grow too densely to allow passage.
In the course of his descriptions, Tsering mentioned three waterfalls on the Tsangpo that he and other hunters had only seen from ledges high above. One of the waterfalls fit Kingdon Ward’s description of Rainbow Falls; another seemed to lie at the point where Ken and the Gillenwaters had lost sight of the Tsangpo the previous summer. Using his arm to indicate its shape, Tsering described the third waterfall as a plume of water farther down the gap. Could one of these three waterfalls be the fabled Falls of the Tsangpo?
Tsering measured on his fingers the respective heights of the mysterious cascades. “The middle one is the highest,” he said. “It’s twice as high as the first, and the third one is smaller than the other two.” He a
dmitted, though, that neither he nor anyone else had ever gone all the way down to the falls. They’d only looked down on them from the cliffs above. “Powerful guardian spirits (suma) reside there,” Tsering said. “It’s not a place to go without a lama.”
Tsering said that until now they’d never told any outsiders, Chinese or otherwise, that there was a way down into the innermost gorge. Hamid and I had returned year after year, he said, we spoke their language, knew their ritual practices and, most of all, we had undertaken the né-kor, or pilgrimage to Kundu Dorsempotrang. He said that the people of Pemako had accepted us now as nangpa, or Buddhist insiders.
WHEN WE REACHED TSACHU, the village perched above the northernmost arc of the Great Bend of the Tsangpo, we climbed through sloping fields of buckwheat to the house of Lama Topgye, one of Pemako’s oldest and most respected lamas. I produced from my pack a letter from Bhakha Tulku that he had sealed with wax and wrapped in a silk khata. Lama Topgye read the letter carefully several times. It was the first news that he had had in years from a compatriot who had been forced to leave Tibet. As he read, Lama Topgye’s wife, an imposing woman garlanded in cats’ eyes and gzi stones, produced the requisite bowls of a particularly intoxicating variety of chang, brewed from local millet.
Lama Topgye sat cross-legged on a worn Tibetan carpet in front of an open window. The ponderous leaves of a banana tree rustled against the sill. Across the subtropical valley, the ice-fluted walls of Gyala Pelri rose to nearly 24,000 feet above sea level. Encouraged by Bhakha Tulku’s letter explaining that Hamid and I had come as Buddhist pilgrims, Lama Topgye pointed to a gilded statue on an altar at the opposite end of the room. “Many centuries ago,” he said, “the Tantric master Padmasambhava composed texts that foretold the way to a paradisiacal sanctuary that will only open when the right circumstances all converge. When the Chinese first came to Tibet, many people tried to find the innermost secret heart of Pemako. Some came back disappointed. Others disappeared into the jungles and never returned. The Chinese told us it was all superstition. They forced us to throw all our books into the Tsangpo.”
I asked Lama Topgye if he remembered a text describing seventy-five waterfalls in the Tsangpo’s innermost gorge, and he lamented that it had in all likelihood been consigned to the waves or destroyed in the earthquake in 1950 that toppled the monastery at Pemakochung. I mentioned the three waterfalls that Tsering had told us about, and Lama Topgye suddenly became pensive. Looking out across the deeply forested valley toward the wall of snow mountains that seal Pemako from the rest of Tibet, he said, “According to Padmasambhava’s prophecies, there are several né-go, or doors, that lead to Pemako’s innermost center. One of them is said to be the largest of three waterfalls in the Tsangpo gorge. But just reaching there doesn’t mean the way will open. The lost termas described specific rituals to open the door. If the right rituals are not performed or one’s motivations are not pure, things could go wrong and the way into Chimé Yangsang Né might close forever.”
Lama Topgye opened a leather box and took out thin red cords called songdu, the talismanic strings that, when tied around the neck, help protect the pilgrim from adversities. “This whole realm,” he said, “belongs to the goddess Dorje Pagmo. She will protect you, but you should go carefully, the way is dangerous.” A false step, he suggested, could lead to one’s plummeting into the Tsangpo as it roars between vertical walls of rock.
As we climbed down the ladder from Lama Topgye’s hut, his sonorous chanting filled our ears. Beating on a double-headed drum suspended from the rafters, he had begun the invocations of local protector spirits that we had asked him to supplicate on our behalf.
WE CROSSED THE TSANGPO on a bridge below the confluence and trekked south along the forested slope of a spur descending from Namcha Barwa. Shortly before nightfall, we arrived in Bayu, where we settled into Tsering’s rough-hewn home and began recruiting hunters for the journey into the gap. Ned filmed them as they packed their meager supplies into bamboo pack baskets, cleaned their primitive Chinese rifles, and offered wild roses at the altar of the local temple. Tsering spread ink on a carved wooden block and printed miniature prayer flags on squares of cotton. He would place them along the path of the takin as offerings to the spirits of the land.
Before beginning the climb to the Shechen-La, we visited Tsering Dondrup’s brother, a lama named Kongchok Wangpo. Dressed in blood-colored robes, he told us that hunters bring the takins’ heads to him after they’re killed to consecrate the meat and ensure the safe passage of the takins’ souls on a crystal pathway to the heart of Yangsang.
ON THE MORNING of our departure, the lama performed a fire ceremony in front of the village temple. As great clouds of fragrant smoke rose and merged with the mists, the hunters prayed for the success of our journey. As we climbed through dense forests toward the Shechen-La, Ned’s filming focused on the hunters’ deep intimacy with the landscape through which they moved. They recited mantras at welling springs where we filled our water bottles and Tsering fixed prayer flags to the overarching trees. Our second day out they showed us the remnants of snares where takin strangled themselves to death in their efforts to break free. They spoke of Yangsang Né as a realm beyond the dichotomies of life and death, a place where takin and those who hunt them are mysteriously united, where fruit falls from the trees of its own accord, and a primal harmony exists between man and beasts—the fulfillment of Thoreau’s advice to “hunt until you can do better.”
As we descended off the snow-covered ridge into the region of the gap, Tsering and the other hunters looked for signs of the takins’ passage. Less than an hour below, with the distant roar of the Tsangpo filtering through thickening mists, they came across tracks that led south, contouring along the slopes of the gorge. Tsering expressed surprise. “They are moving early this year,” he said.
After picking our way across landslides and snow-choked gullies, we reached a narrow shelf where Tsering determined we should camp. We spent hours carving a ledge large enough for a single two-man tent that Hamid, Ned, and I were compelled to share. The hunters sheltered under tarpaulins stretched between trees. It began to rain during the night, and by morning we were caught in a deluge. In a region where metereological events are held to signify guardian deities’ response to human intercessors, the weather was definitely not in our favor.
For the next three days, we holed up in the single tent in weather that seemed like the end of the world. A torrent of rocks and boulders tumbled down on either side of the camp and knocked out the supports of the plastic tarpaulins that the hunters and the Sherpas used for shelter. When we ventured out from the tent, clouds of gnats descended upon us, inflaming any bit of exposed skin. The hunters huddled by the smoky fire, which offered partial relief. Lama, the former monk who had come with us on the pilgrimage to Kundu, performed endless fire offerings, as much to keep the gnats at bay as to appease the local spirits.
Across the gorge, flitting in and out of the swirling gray mists, was the triangular-shaped peak that Tsering called Dorje Pagmo Dzong. Its jagged ridges and crowning pyramid of slate-black rock formed a citadel of the great goddess of the Tsangpo gorges. “Beneath that peak lies the largest of the three waterfalls,” Tsering said. From where we were camped, at the edge of an abyss, the falls seemed as inaccessible as the peak itself.
I’d waited out storms in ice caves near the tops of mountains in Norway and the Alps, but this collapsing, gnat-plagued ledge was beyond anything I had encountered. Claustrophobia drove Ned from the tent, and now he sat under the tarpaulins on pine boughs amid clouds of smoke, immersing himself in Sal-man Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. By wearing gloves and exposing little more than his eyes, he evaded all but the most persistent gnats. Whenever Hamid and I joined him, he discoursed passionately on favorite films such as The Passenger, whose themes of cultural and personal displacement seemed increasingly relevant to our current circumstances. As we waited out the storm, Ned invoked Wern
er Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God, a film about the search for El Dorado in the jungles of Peru by a party of conquistadors. As civilization vanishes in their wake, restraints dissolve and the men—led by their greed and a demoniacal Klaus Kinski—descend into the vortex of their darkest beings.
Looking down into the cloud-wrapped depths of the gorge reminded me of another film called The Valley (Obscured by Clouds) that had even odder parallels with our journey. Produced and directed in 1972 by the iconoclastic French filmmaker Barbet Schroeder, the film opens with a tantalizing overhead pan of the New Guinea highlands, shot through banks of mist and accompanied by an ethereal soundtrack by the rock band Pink Floyd. An unseen narrator describes a lost valley from which previous explorers have never returned, a blank spot on the map perpetually covered by clouds that legend says may be paradise on earth. But even the primitive tribes who live closest to it dare not venture there, as it is the dwelling place of their gods.
The film chronicles the Dionysian odyssey of a small band of French and European dreamers who venture into the primeval mountains in search of the legendary valley. Joined by a French consul officer’s bourgeois wife who is searching for plumage of the endangered bird of paradise, the adventurers encounter Stone Age tribes and imbibe hallucinogenic tree sap as they journey ever deeper into morally and geographically ambiguous terrain. The film ends as they reach the rim of the long-sought valley, abandoned by their guides and divested of food and bearings.
Like a cross between Lost Horizon and Acopolypse Now, The Valley (Obscured by Clouds) has all the trappings of fantasy, but much of it was unvarnished reality, shot on location and spontaneously scripted. Our vision for the Buddhist Hunters of the Tsangpo Gorges was strictly documentary, but like The Valley, we hoped to use it to explore modern society’s yearning for a primitive golden age. By sharing the traditions of the Pemako gorges with those who would never come here, we hoped to introduce a wholly different worldview, in which the possibility of Yangsang is an ever-present reality.