A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  Across this wilderness ran the Tasam highway, the trade-route that led from Ladakh up the Indus valley to the trading centre of Gartok and then on eastwards down the Tsangpo valley to Lhasa. Those who travelled unarmed along the Tasam highroad provided an easy prey for the chief predators of the Chang Tang, fast-moving posses of armed bandits mounted on shaggy ponies and even shaggier yaks. The Jesuits were warned that to go any further without an escort was to risk death: they should stay in Tashigang until they could attach themselves to a caravan. This was the accepted and, indeed, the only safe way to travel in Tibet for vulnerable travellers. The land itself and its hostility to natural life –where every little comfort and every means of existence had to be fought for – brutalized and bred violence, and the philosophy of Buddha offered a means of keeping the violence at bay. It was a fact of Tibetan life with which every visitor from the outside world had to come to terms, that a people committed to a religion of peace and compassion lived permanently on the brink of chaos and strife.

  The Jesuits, too, had their philosophy. They prayed, and ‘God who never abandons those who put their trust in Him provided us with the best escort that could be imagined.’ Their supplications were answered in the beguiling form of a Tartar princess, who was about to start from Tashigang with a large caravan and an escort bound for Lhasa:

  Standing before her with hands uplifted in a worshipping attitude, we presented her with a piece of Bengal cloth embroidered and red in colour (for the Tartars have a great liking for stuffs in red) and with ten crowns in the bargain. The lady, whose pretty face was radiant at receiving our gifts, raised her eyes to ours and asked us with womanly curiosity: ‘To what do we owe your presence and where is fate leading you?’

  Speaking through their Moslem interpreter, Desideri and Freyre told the princess that they were ‘well-meaning pilgrims’ heading for Lhasa and asked to join her caravan. She replied that it would be an honour to be able to help two lamas from a far-off land and their presence would be very welcome. She was also able to give them some sound advice as to how best to prepare for what lay ahead:

  For three whole months the traveller finds no village nor any living creature; he must therefore take with him all provisions, such as tea, butter, flour or parched barley and meat, which becomes so frozen that it will keep for a long time. Not only must one carry provisions for the men, but barley and flour for the horses, the ground being generally so covered with snow that they can find no food. Water is frozen hard and for cooking you have to thaw snow or ice over a fire. Now wood is not to be found in the desert, save here and there a few prickly bushes, and to make a fire one has to search for the dry dung of horses and cattle. Your bed at night is the earth, off which you have to scrape the snow, and your roof is the sky, from which falls snow and sleet.

  Helped by their princess the Jesuits bought further provisions for themselves and for their three Christian servants and Moslem interpreter, as well as knee-length sheepskin poshteens, sheepskin boots and sheepskin hats. At first these luxuries – ‘suggested partly by self-love and partly to protect our servants against frostbite’ – troubled Desideri greatly, but his doubts vanished when the full rigours of a winter crossing of the Chang Tang became apparent.

  The caravan set out in mid-October, leaving Tashigang in great pomp and style:

  At the head of our caravan rode a number of the Princess’s servants and some squadrons of Tartar cavalry, followed by the Princess and her Tartar ladies, all on horseback; her ministers and the officers of her army. Then came more Tartar cavalry with whom we generally rode. The rear guard was also composed of cavalry, and a crowd of men on foot and led horses.

  Once they were on the exposed plateau it soon became clear that the risk of ‘losing nose, fingers, toes and even your life’ was never going to be far away. The linen tents that the Jesuits had brought with them from India proved to be hopelessly inadequate: accumulated snow and ice made them heavy and unmanageable and when a strong wind was blowing it was almost impossible to peg them down. ‘The night was rather a cessation of fatigue than real repose,’ noted Freyre, ‘the intense cold and the intolerable annoyance of the insects harboured in our clothes prevented any real sleep.’ Like the Tibetans the Jesuits had decided that warmth was preferable to cleanliness, which meant putting up with three months of accumulated dirt and playing host to a rich assortment of insects. Freyre reveals that Desideri stopped washing after the water he was lifting in his cupped hands froze to his beard – ‘and a fine sight he looked with his face stuck round with icicles!’ Whenever the opportunity occurred, they held de-lousing sessions: ‘Now and then, seated in the sun, we would remove some clothes, and were saved the trouble of picking the lice off one by one – for we could simply sweep them off!’

  The progress of every caravan in Tibet is extremely slow. The pack animals move forward at their own pace and where there is a patch of grazing they are allowed to spend several days resting and building up their reserves. These enforced delays gave the members of the Tartar princess’s caravan ample time to get to know each other. Desideri and the princess soon became close friends – a relationship that Desideri looked back on nostalgically in later years: ‘As I had learnt a little of the language from our interpreter, she would invite me to her tent and order my horse to be cared for.’ Here the young Jesuit would sit down on a rug by his hostess and sip salt-butter tea and do his best to answer her questions about Europe and its customs, as well as all sorts of inquiries about ‘Our Holy Law, the images of saints in my breviary, my manner of praying and the meaning of my prayers’.

  One evening after sunset Desideri left his princess and began to look round the camp for his own tents, which were being brought up by Emanoel Freyre and the rest of their party. It soon became apparent that they had failed to arrive:

  Much troubled I waited until the third hour of the night, when at last our three Christian servants arrived with the baggage horse. I anxiously asked about the Father [Freyre] and the interpreter. They said that by his orders they had left them behind. The Father’s horse having fallen exhausted in the snow, he had decided to wait until the poor beast recovered a little.

  Greatly alarmed, Desideri sent a message to the princess asking for her help. A search party was quickly assembled and sent back along their trail until eventually Father Freyre and the interpreter were found half-buried and half-frozen in the snow. They were brought to the princess’s tent and thawed out in front of a large fire, where Father Freyre explained that his horse had dropped dead from hunger and exhaustion: ‘When daylight vanished I lost trace of the others. All I could do was to lie against the horse’s belly for the sake of warmth and wait for the morning.’ As Desideri and Freyre were considering how best to overcome the loss of one of their seven horses, their hostess again came to their rescue by offering Freyre one of her own.

  This is only one of many acts of kindness towards the Jesuits and their servants shown by this engaging and courageous woman. Although Freyre had less opportunity to get to know her intimately, he too was greatly impressed by her. Again and again in his narrative he cites instances of her solicitude:

  Often when the terrible wind and cold would chafe my face so severely as to make me exclaim (I confess it): ‘A curse on this cold!’ she would comfort us with hot tea and some meat. Through the mouth of her interpreter she would tell us to have courage, for no dangers from the mountains nor avalanches had power to harm us if we kept to her side. Once when she saw me frozen to a state of inertness, she said to me: ‘Hand me your coat,’ and ordered one of her servants to line the sleeves with goat skins, the fur to the inside, and to place them in such a way that the hands should always be protected.

  It took the caravan more than a month to journey up the valley of the Gartong Chhu, the southern tributary of the Indus. Early in November they crossed over the Jerko La, the 16,300-foot pass over the watershed between the Indus and Sutlej river systems. At this point they were as close as they ever came to Des
ideri’s original goal. Directly below them to the south lay the head waters of the Sutlej with the northern slopes of the Himalayan peaks beyond; only fifty miles downstream was Tsaparang and its ruined church. But Gugé and its seven centuries of ascendancy had already passed out of Tibetan history and there was no one to point Desideri in its direction.

  The caravan continued its journey eastwards and away from Tsaparang. Had Freyre been told of its fate, he would have heaved a sigh of relief and demanded to be directed without delay towards the nearest pass into India. Desideri would have wanted to go on. His original interest in Andrade and his Christian outpost had been overtaken by a stronger urge: a passionate desire to get to know Tibet and to come to terms with its religion – and if this meant journeying on to Lhasa and studying all that Lhasa had to offer, then it had to be done.

  They had now entered the holy land of Kailas-Manasarovar, a region venerated by the Tibetans, so Desideri learned, ‘on account of a certain Urghien [Padmasambava], who is the founder of the religion professed in Tibet’. As the caravan descended from the Jerko pass, Desideri was shown where Urghien was said to have his abode, in a high peak called Ngari Niongar. It was among the mountains close at hand to the north-east – where Kailas stood veiled in clouds:

  Away from the road there stands an enormously high mountain, very wide in circumference, its summit hidden among the clouds, covered with perpetual snow and ice, and most terrible on account of the icy cold. In a cave of that mountain, according to legend, there lived the above-mentioned Urghien in absolute, retirement and uninterrupted meditation. Not only do the Tibetans visit the cave, where they invariably leave some presents, but with very great inconvenience to themselves they make the round of the whole mountain, an occupation of some days, by which they gain what I might call great indulgences.

  A few days later, in late November 1715, the tents of the Tartar princess’s caravan were raised on the meadows beside a large lake, ‘some days’ march in circumference, from which the Ganges is supposed to take its source’. It was the fabled Manasarovar of the Puranas. Desideri was told that the lake’s name was Retoa, but he had no difficulty in associating it with the traditional source of India’s holy river. He observed that it was ‘held in high veneration by the superstitious people’ and that the pilgrims walked round it ‘with great devotion’. He and Freyre had approached the lake from the north-west, first moving up what Desideri had assumed to be the main branch of the Indus to its supposed source. Then they had dropped down from the Jerko La to the headwaters of another river, flowing westwards, which appeared to have its source in one large lake. All this suggested to Desideri that he had arrived at the Origi Gangis et Indi of Athanasius Kircher and Antonio de Andrade, the place where the two great rivers of Mogul India had their beginnings:

  I think that this mountain of Ngari Niongar [Kailas] should be recognized as the true origin and source not only of the Ganges but also of the Indus. For as this is the highest point from which the land sinks down on both sides, the waters which descend from there on the western side flow into Second Tibet, as experience shows, and from there into Little Tibet. Then, breaking through the mountains of Kashmir, they at last reach Little Guzzarrat, there to form the wide and navigable Indus. In the same way, the waters that descend from Ngari Niongar on the eastern side first flow into lake Retoa [Manasarovar] then take their course downwards and so gradually become the Ganges.

  So true is this description of the drainage of the Kailas region and the course of the Indus that it is hard to believe that Desideri had nothing to go on but his own observations. He was wrong only in thinking that the second river was the Ganga, but in the circumstances he could not have known otherwise. Some days later he stood on the watershed of a third great river system, and again his conclusions, drawn from his own experience and from information gathered from the Tibetans, were uncannily accurate.

  The caravan had toiled eastwards from the lake onto the 16,900-foot Maryum La, the divide between the Sutlej and the Tsangpo. Here it was Desideri’s turn to have a horse die under him, and have a fresh one given him by the Tartar princess. But now the great desert plateau lay behind them and their course would run for five hundred miles alongside a river known simply as ‘great river’ or Tsang-Po, a river that Desideri soon realized was Tibet’s main artery:

  Flowing from west to east it traverses the centre of Third Tibet [Tibet proper] and then turning to the south-east enters the country of Lhoba, whence it descends to Rong-mati [Assam] a province of Mogor [Mogul India] beyond the Ganges, into which this principal river of Tibet at last flows.

  This single paragraph contained the essential facts about the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra connection, over which geographers and map-makers were to dispute and quarrel for another century and a half. For the whole of that period it remained, along with the rest of Desideri’s work on Tibet, unnoticed and unread on the bookshelves of an Italian country villa.

  Eventually the Jesuits and their companions reached Lhasa. They were not the first Europeans to get there; two Jesuit fathers had reached Lhasa from Peking in 1661. But Desideri was well aware that it was a prize that few travellers would ever hope to attain, and he later recorded his achievement with a certain flourish: ‘Finally, two years and four months after I left Goa, and one year and a half since our departure from Delli, and ten whole months since leaving Kascimir, we arrived by the grace of God, on the eighteenth day of March 1716, at the city of Lhasa, capital of this Tibet.’

  The city stood at the centre of a plain surrounded on all sides by mountains. Just inside the city gates, on their left as they rode through the outskirts, was the ‘residence of the Grand Lama of Tibet’, the famous Potala Palace. It was built on a huge rock and dominated the city:

  To the south is a handsome square surrounded by high walls with great gates and bulwarks like a fortress. From here a wide, well-planned and easy staircase leads up to the summit of the rock, where stands a sumptuous palace five storeys high. The riches contained therein are inestimable, especially in the apartment of the Grand Lama.

  Lhasa itself was not particularly extensive – Freyre was disappointed to find that it was ‘only the size of three parishes’ – but it was densely populated, both by Tibetans and by traders from all over Asia. Here the Jesuit fathers parted from their escort and their benefactress. Both men were very conscious of the enormous debt they owed her and Desideri, in particular, sorely missed her company. ‘The Princess stayed a short time at the Court,’ he wrote later:

  She soon went elsewhere into a convent of their sect where she became a nun. So that when I had really mastered the language I could not, as I so heartily wished, see her again and have the opportunity to initiate her into our holy faith. But I pray to God constantly and fervently to recompense her for all the benefits bestowed on us, to illuminate her, convert her, and grant her eternal salvation.

  Another parting in Lhasa took place without much regret on either side. After less than a month in the city, Desideri’s travelling companion of two and a half years left for India:

  My companion had always lived in hot climates and feared the intense cold and thin air, so after staying a few days in Lhasa to recuperate, he left by the more frequented road through Nepal and returned to Hindustan. Thus I remained for some time alone, the only Missionary, indeed the only European in this immense country of the Three Tibets.

  In less than three weeks Emanoel Freyre was in Nepal, where he stayed for five months at the Capuchin mission in Kathmandu. After an eventful stay punctuated by outbreaks of plague, civil insurrection and an attempt to burn down the mission, he moved down into the Indian plains. Eventually he returned to the Jesuit mission at Agra where, in April 1717, he sat down to write his Report on Tibet for his Vicar-General. Yet Freyre seems to have been unable to settle down once more to ordinary mission work; two years later he left the Jesuits and moved down to join the large Indo-Portuguese community in Goa. A petition for his readmission to the Society which appears
on Jesuit records for 1724 was apparently unsuccessful. Perhaps Freyre was too prone to human weakness to make either a good Jesuit or a good explorer.

  Ippolito Desideri stayed on in Tibet for five years. At his first royal audience, he made a powerful impression on the ‘King’ of Tibet (the sixth Dalai Lama) and his chief minister and was given permission to speak and proselytize freely. Desideri records how: ‘From that day until I left Tibet I made it a rule to study from early morning to sundown, and for nearly six years took nothing during the day save cia [tea] to drink.’ First he set himself to learn the Tibetan language and later, after presenting the Dalai Lama with a book written in Tibetan, ‘to explain our faith and to refute their false religion’, began a major study of Tibetan Buddhism as it was set out in its canonical texts. This work was interrupted by the Tartar invasion of Tibet, during which Lhasa was sacked, the great Potala Palace stormed and the King and his chief minister killed. Desideri took refuge in a monastery eight days’ march from Lhasa, where he was able to continue with his studies without isolating himself from the historic events that were taking place nearby.

  The disorders ended with the arrival of a vast and utterly invincible Chinese army which effectively brought Tibet into the dominion of the Manchu Emperors. Those who enjoy historical ironies may ponder on the fact that Andrade’s mission to Tsaparang marked the fall of the kingdom of Gugé, while Desideri’s stay in Lhasa coincided with the end of Tibet’s independence from China.

  In 1719 it was decided in Rome that the task of converting the heathen of Tibet should be transferred from the Jesuits to the Capuchins. It took time for the order of withdrawal to be transmitted to Desideri and for Desideri to respond, but finally he could delay his departure no longer. In April 1721 he left Lhasa. He managed to spend the winter in Tibet and Nepal, so it was not until April 1722 that he arrived at the Jesuit College in Agra – seven years and seven months since he and Father Freyre had first set out for Tibet. He never found any trace of a Christian community in Tibet, nor did he make much effort to establish one. His was a quest of a different order, a search for knowledge partly in order to refute it and partly for its own sake. He had the kind of lust that Kipling describes in Kim: