The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  More distressing news followed: Tashi claimed that more than one hundred Chinese were currently camped below the Doshung-La pass with the intention of forging their way through the inner reaches of the Tsangpo gorge. A separate team would be heading in from the Po Tsangpo confluence. The Chinese had heard rumors of a ninety-eight-foot waterfall in the deepest section of the gorge, Tashi said, and had plans to “discover” it.

  Only later did we learn that the Chinese had announced their plans on a BBC World Service broadcast radio report on October 23, three days before our departure from Kathmandu. The dispatch stated that: “Large sections of the Yarlung-Zangbo Grand Canyon remain completely unexplored.” A team of Chinese scientists would complete “one of the most important expeditions of the century” with the express purpose of entering “for the first time” into the waterfall section, “a.k.a the Five-Mile Gap. No one has ever gone through it on foot,” the announcement continued. “About forty members of the team . . . hope to be the first to walk its length, and the first human beings ever to penetrate a 100-kilometer [62-mile] section in the middle.”

  NEW REGULATIONS IN BAYI compelled us to sleep in the recently opened Lingchi Hotel, a colossal edifice with faulty plumbing, premised on some idle hope of mass tourism. We seemed to be its only guests.

  The prospect of a multipronged Chinese expedition with the same objective as our own deeply disturbed us, and we inadvertently found ourselves poised for a race to “close the gap” and document any waterfall that might lie in its depths. The statement concerning a totally unknown one hundred kilometers was in all likelihood a misprint. But even if they had meant the ten kilometers (6.2 miles) below Rainbow Falls, we suspected that the Chinese did not know that Monpa hunters had plied animal tracks through this territory for generations. The Chinese news brief was in accord with long-standing perceptions that the Five-Mile Gap was an untouched wilderness.

  If the Chinese team based near the confluence had already headed upriver, our only hope of reaching the waterfall before them lay in their attempting to travel along the Tsangpo’s left bank, as we ourselves had in 1996. But if they’d done their research properly, they would know it was impossible.

  As we sat in the hotel dining room over bowls of pale rice gruel, Ken invoked Pemako’s fearsome protector deity. “I can’t believe Dorje Traktsen would let the Chinese get away with this,” he said, ignoring the fact that our own mission differed only in scale and philosophic disposition. Preparing himself for the worst, Ken said, “Whether or not that falls is over one hundred feet, it’s still a natural wonder. Just to see it in its full glory will be an incredible experience.”

  Ken’s diversions into the literature of the sublime offered a counterpoint to our geographical ambitions. As we continued our meal, Ken expounded on the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s evocation of waterfalls in the Alps. In Shelley’s alluring poem “Mont Blanc,” the streams of water “flow through the mind” and represent the inseparability of human consciousness from the universe itself. In “Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude,” Shelley conjured a grander waterfall symbolizing a mystical rapture encompassing life and death. Another poet, Southey, invoked 157 varieties of descending water in the Falls of Lodore, a verbal flood far exceeding the waterfall he sought to describe.7

  Ken also recounted his explorations of nineteenth-century landscape painting. The idealized renderings of waterfalls by the great English landscape artist William Turner (1775-1851) and the American painter Frederic Church (1826- 1900) offered visions of the sublime to those who could not directly view the works of nature. Stretching the entire length of museum walls, Church’s monolithic canvases of Niagara Falls drew thousands of viewers who traveled in their imagination—instead of by carriage—to the colossal waterfall on their frontier.

  Niagara Falls endures as an environment in which many seek to renew their capacity for wonder. At 162 feet Niagara is far from being the world’s highest waterfall, yet its three-quarters of a mile breadth and quantity of flow give it a grandeur and beauty attested to by the more than four million honeymooners and tourists who visit it each year. So important is the falls as an icon of the American nation that a joint U.S.-Canadian Fallscape committee regulates Niagara’s flow to preserve its visual purity.8 To achieve a more sublime vista and to control erosion, the falls authorities at one point turned off all the water and reshaped the dolomite rock at Niagara’s crest. My great-great grandfather, Henry Martyn Baker, had visited Niagara in 1850 with his sister Henrietta and had written in his journal that: “When I had a full view of the Falls . . . my anticipations were fully realized. . . . We [saw] more this afternoon of the grandness of nature than we had ever before witnessed.”

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, October 30, we drove out of Bayi, engines straining as our Land Cruisers climbed toward the pass that would lead us down toward the Tsangpo gorge. Pilgrims en route to Lhasa were descending toward us from the 15,440-foot pass, pilgrims’ staffs in hand and their possessions tied into bundles across their backs. Two monks from Kham prostrated their way along the length of the road, avoiding the shortcuts between the switchbacks, and trailed by a young novice who ferried their canvas tent and provisions in a weathered wagon.

  Emerging from forests of tsuga hemlocks, towering firs, and larches turning gold in the autumn air, we reached the treeless mountain pass. As the Sherpas strung prayer flags between giant boulders, we gazed across layers of cloud toward Namcha Barwa, its upper reaches veiled by towering thunderheads. Intermittently the pyramidal summit broke free of clouds and stood illuminated by an unseen sun. We climbed back into the Land Cruisers and wound downward through dense forest into the valley of Tongyuk. Yaks and dzos foraged through the fallow fields and stacks of hay hung drying in the notches of trees. A sprawling logging camp set up by the Chinese had displaced the old shingle-roofed Tibetan village. The roadside restaurants, primitive guesthouses, and provision shops that cater to passing truckers and line the single street had been reconstructed, not in the ubiquitous timber, but in white ceramic tiles that gave the impression of an extended open air bathroom.

  Twenty minutes beyond Tongyuk, we saw Western-style tents set back from the road in a rocky field. Doris and Harry Wetherbee had established a base camp there and were awaiting the arrival of Wick Walker and the remaining members of their expedition. They recounted the tragedy as far as they knew it from communications with Wick through a static-filled satellite phone. Less than seventeen miles below Gyala and upriver from where a glacier on the southern face of Gyala Pelri spills directly into the Tsangpo, Doug Gordon had failed to right himself after plunging with his kayak over an eight-foot waterfall that he and the three other paddlers had previously scouted and determined to be runnable. He’d been swept into an enormous series of rapids, and the lethal waters of the Tsangpo had closed over his head. The remaining members of the river team had searched downriver for four days without seeing a trace of either Doug or his boat.

  As we drove on toward the road head, we came across the remaining members of the team who had trekked into Trulung that afternoon. Wick Walker, the expedition leader and pointman for the four-person land team, recounted how they had tried without success to travel upstream along the left bank of the Tsangpo. To reach the paddlers and help search for Doug Gordon’s body, they had crossed the 13,000-foot pass that Ken Storm, Ralph Rynning, and I had climbed in 1996 and that I had told them about when we first met in McLean, Virginia. After descending to the Tsangpo, they’d traveled upriver for approximately three miles before being forced back by intractable cliffs. Meanwhile, the river team had continued downstream on foot and by kayak, or as Tom McEwan put it, “boat-assisted hiking.”

  Wick’s team had not been able to make significant headway downstream from the base of the pass and, when Tom McEwan and the other members of the river team reached them, they performed a final ceremony for Doug on the banks of the Tsangpo. Afterward, they retraced their route over what Ken ha
d dubbed Takin Pass and trekked back to the confluence. They ate plentifully, Wick reported. Their hunter/guides had killed five takin and several goral in the swampy plains of Neythang. By Wick’s estimates, they still would have been ferrying loads of dried meat back to their village. We both hoped that the resident herds could sustain the Monpas’ sometimes immoderate predations.

  FARTHER DOWN THE ROAD, a massive landslide had blocked all traffic, and we pitched in with shovels to clear a path for our Land Cruisers through the half-frozen rubble. At the small village of Dongchu (formerly Tongyuk Dzong), a half hour’s drive beyond, we hired a derelict Dong Feng cargo truck to return to the site of the rockfall and to collect the Sherpas and expedition gear from our supply truck that we had been forced to abandon on the far side of the slide. They arrived after dark and we slept in a wooden shack perched above the road, not far from where Kinthup had been sold into slavery by his rogue companion.

  I drifted off to sleep contemplating the strange convergence that was occurring now in the Tsangpo gorge. Wick’s team had decided to return home rather than continue their journey through the Tsangpo’s uncharted depths. The Chinese—as far as we knew—had already begun their siege-scale assault. Nima, our Tibetan guide from Wind Horse Adventure, informed us that Chinese Central Television was broadcasting three-minute dispatches every night documenting their progress. I could only hope they had no awareness that our small team of three Americans was headed directly for the Five-Mile Gap. The innate lure of the missing link was undeniable, but the highly publicized Chinese expedition had become something of a dark mirror in which we caught glimpses of less noble motivations.

  The drive from Dongchu the next morning led through thick forests of bamboo and alder, the river we were following all the while gaining force as it dropped precipitously through the narrowing gorge. We crossed more incipient landslides, removed uprooted trees that had fallen across the track, and descended ever deeper. Late in the afternoon, we camped on the side of the road by the dissolving footbridge that we would cross the following morning to reach the Tsangpo gorge.

  Four pilgrims from Kham had set up a canvas tent in the same clearing on the edges of Trulung. They sat around a campfire in thick sheepskin chubas, their long hair braided with strands of red wool. Consummate pilgrims, they were garlanded in protective amulets and had survived on alms as they made their way toward Lhasa from the far reaches of eastern Tibet. They pleaded with us for photographs of the Dalai Lama, not taking no for an answer, as if persistence itself would alter the fact that none of us had one.

  As we shared the small clearing with the Khampa pilgrims, their tattered gray tent held up with a single hemlock pole, I felt a strange sense of fellowship. I could only hope that their ceaseless peregrinations, a mirror of my own spiritual restlessness, would lead them to a clear and present grace. By some interpretations Yangsang Né is simply an inner revelation, bearing only coincidental relationship with the outside world. Could it happen anywhere, this discovery of the ultimate beyul? I thought of Jesus’ words in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas: “The Kingdom of God is spread across the earth but men do not see it.”

  LOCAL VILLAGERS EAGER for work overran our camp and chatted up Nima and the Sherpas. Even porters who in the past had stolen from us avowed eternal friendship. According to one of our “friends” from Mondrang, the group of Chinese—forty-three by his count—had only gone as far as the confluence and then returned. If so, the way ahead would be clear for us. Trulung’s headman ambled up and claimed that there never was a Chinese group encamped here at all. The Chinese had combined their forces, he said, and would be setting out together from Pe. If they could get through the gorge, they would eventually arrive here in several weeks.

  Each informant offered us conflicting “facts.” The Chinese expedition felt in these moments like an illusion, a projection of our worst fears. Yet unlike the pilgrims from Kham who had become adept in denying inconvenient realities, we could not will the phantom expedition into nonexistence. Still, in this strange land, where prayers are used to alter reality, a sense of enchantment enveloped us, as if the world was not so much what appears as how we choose to envision it.

  Like the Buddha led out by his carriage driver from the confines of his palace, the Tibetan road had confronted us with challenges to the spirit: from the material avarice of Tibetan pilgrims to the labyrinths of Chinese bureaucracy. In Bayi, the chief of police had dispelled all notions of an earthly paradise. When he was in Medok, he told us, one of his horses had been eaten alive by leeches, and a soldier who had broken a leg in the jungle had nearly succumbed to the same fate, his face and limbs covered in the blood-engorged freshwater worms until a band of Monpas responded to his plaintive cries.

  Pemako had inspired myths and exalted ideals but the region itself harbored many harsh realities. As Chatral Rinpoche had explained: “Don’t think of Pemako as a literal paradise as described in the scrolls. Pemako is a paradise for Buddhist practice, a place where all things can be encountered and brought to the path.” Like the fourteenth-century Dzogchen master Longchenpa who described the greatest places of pilgrimage as those which make the mind waver, Chatral Rinpoche intimated that in places where human life is tenuous and heaven and hell converge, reality can be more intimately perceived. What would we find in the hidden depths of the Tsangpo gorge? Perhaps, in the end, it would depend as much on how we looked as what was actually there. As Tibetans say, we would have to see not just with our eyes, but with our hearts.

  Down the Po Tsangpo

  ON NOVEMBER 1, we awoke to the same light drizzle that had been falling continuously since late the previous evening. A Monpa hunter who had traveled with us in 1996 zipped open the door to my tent.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “it won’t rain.”

  Blandly ignoring the steady drizzle, the hunter invoked our journey two years earlier when we had been blessed with uncommonly good weather. On that occasion, the hunters had convinced themselves that I was using the claw of a mythical hawk called a garuda to avert the normally pervasive rain. They’d pleaded with me at the time to give them a small piece of it, unable to believe that the compliant weather was pure coincidence.

  The Monpa hunter secured a load from the Sherpas and joined the stream of porters—both men and women—flowing across the footbridge toward the fluted cliffs that line the southern bank of the Rong Chu River. We followed them across landslides and fern-draped ravines. Matted filaments of gray-green moss drifted amid the trees and the wet foliage penetrated our nostrils like a heady incense. The shrill sound of cicadas played over the hypnotic drone of the river that surged beneath us through a narrow gorge. In Tibetan meditations on the sound of water, the adept unites the fluidity within his or her own body-mind with the waters of the external environment. The same process applies to qualities of earth, fire, air, and space. If brought to completion, this form of meditation is believed to lead to a state in which the boundaries of the individual ego are replaced by a deep, transparent empathy with the phenomenal world.

  Buddhist prayer flags, their colors representing the dynamic harmony of all the elements, fluttered from rocks and trees where the churning currents of the Rong Chu joined the Po Tsangpo. The massive white water of the merging rivers reeled relentlessly toward the Tsangpo, roughly thirty miles downriver. We would follow its course to the apex of the Tsangpo’s Great Bend.

  A tremor on October 24 had caused numerous landslides that gouged wide swaths through the forest and, until a few days before, had blocked off the route to Tsachu. But the slopes had stabilized somewhat and, after six hours of walking, we reached Yumé, a stretch of white sand bordering the banks of the Po Tsangpo. Sulfur springs flowed from beneath enormous boulders, their warm red currents carving through rocks and sand to join with the cool waters of the Po Tsangpo. At dusk, three female Monpa porters bathed in the hot springs, coyly beckoning us, then pelting us with mud from the shallow, steaming pond. They l
ater joined us by the fire, their wet hair shining as the moon rose above the dancing flames. Gossamer clouds gathered above the river, then vanished like phantoms. From bivouacs in wet leech-infested forests to losing our way in Adrathang—the primeval savannah from which we thought we would never emerge—past journeys in Pemako had brought us to the limits of physical and mental endurance. But now, free of leeches, gnats, and rain, Pemako was suddenly living up to the rhapsodic descriptions of the ancient scrolls.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, November 2, we left Yumé, crossed to the opposite bank of the Po Tsangpo, and began the steep climb to the village of Tsachu. The sheer, glaciated walls of Gyala Pelri, free of their usual veil of clouds, rose above wild banana trees and towering ferns. At the outskirts of the village, I warded off predatory dogs with my bamboo staff and climbed a notched log into the home of Sonam Nima, the village headman, who had hosted Ken and me five years earlier after our first passage through the gorge. After tea and chang, Ken, Hamid, and I climbed farther up the hill with Bryan to visit Lama Topgye, in hopes of learning more about the region of the gap, and of filming for a Western audience his perspectives on the gorge.

  The trail passed a small cave draped with prayer flags. An image of Dorje Drolo, the wrathful form that Padmasambhava took on in Pemako, emerged from the rock wall.9 Lama Topgye’s wood-planked house rose above on stilts of alder wood that resists Pemako’s all-pervasive dampness. We climbed up a short ladder to the door where the lama’s wife beckoned us over the threshold. Lama Topgye sat in the far corner of the room in front of an altar covered with bronze and terra-cotta statues. His bell, dorje, and other ritual instruments lay on the table in front of him. We offered white khatas and told him of our intention to descend to the largest of the waterfalls and to look for the door to Yangsang. I asked if he could tell us more about the area and the nature of the portal.