Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

by Glenn Dixon

  Puffing a bit, I tried to scuttle up a sharp slope of tufa. It was gritty like sandstone, and nothing much grew on it, so there were no roots for a foothold or branches to grasp. I was near the top when I fell, probably ten metres above the ground. Actually, I didn’t fall as much as slide, tobogganing down the slope, spread-eagled, with my hands desperately clawing for something to grab. I managed to keep myself upright, and when I smacked into the gully at the bottom, it was my feet that hit first.

  It could have been worse. I stood for a moment, breathing deeply, then slowly I turned my hands over to look at them. The palms were shredded and were bleeding badly. None of the abrasions were deep enough for stitches, but I knew I had to get back to the hostel immediately. I had to rinse the wounds and apply some disinfectant. Then I would have to bandage my hands and would likely not be able to clutch anything hard for several days to come.

  Frustrated, I shook my head and set off again, winding around the massive pillars of rock. Manoeuvring up, over, through, and around the endless gullies and chasms, I eventually came to a softening and gentling in the landscape. The pinnacles were more distantly spaced here, and between them a jumble of irregularly shaped plots of land fought for space.

  These were farmed plots, and though no one was around, it was at least a sign of civilization, so I knew I must be nearing a road. I’d been warned to stay off the fields. The people who tilled the fertile soil didn’t look kindly on tourists trooping across their crops.

  I skirted the edge of one large patch and then, with no trail in sight, started to work my way around the edges toward the next heap of stones that would carry me south. And that was where it happened. A large German shepherd was lying in a shallow irrigation ditch ahead of me. I didn’t see it until it sprang up. The fur bristled across the back of its neck, and it began to bark, fangs bared and snapping at the air.

  Almost instantly five more German shepherds reared up. They pranced toward me, barking insanely, closing into a pack and forming a semicircle around me. I had nothing with which to protect myself, though it occurred to me I could whirl my camera on its strap like a sling. It was a heavy old single-lens-reflex camera, and I could at least wallop one of the dogs before I went under.

  Still, that was cold comfort. Sure I’d get at least one of them, but the rest would then maul me. They’d also kill me if I tried to run. However, I figured they wouldn’t attack if I didn’t make any sudden aggressive movements. The dogs stood their ground, howling hot fury, but instinctively they wouldn’t strike until I reacted. And I wouldn’t flip that evolutionary switch for them. I didn’t stop but kept walking at the same pace I’d been going when the first dog popped up. That beast was slightly off to the side now, and by keeping a steady pace, I moved between it and the others. I kept my eyes on the ground, held my breath, and continued on.

  With my head lowered I strolled right through that snarling pack — an electric moment that but for the flicker of a finger could have set them ripping into me. I kept moving, conscious of them still growling at my back, but they didn’t follow and I didn’t turn. Even when I rounded the corner, I didn’t run. After about ten minutes, I came to a road. My hands were now smarting and shaking at the same time, while my jaw was tight with tension.

  It doesn’t sound that bad in retrospect, but I know now that I had been closer to death than I’d ever been before, and that still spooks me. The incident in Turkey was much more terrifying than my adventure with the dogs that actually did bite me in northern Spain.

  Perhaps time is needed to construct an edifice for fear, a racheting of tension is required, each moment slightly more unnerving than the last — capped, of course, with the perversely fascinating prospect of one’s own death. Is this really the way it will be? we think. Can it be … in a place like this?

  The day after I was surrounded by German shepherds in Turkey, as I was leaving the village of Göreme, hands bandaged and heart stilled, I ambled past the building where Mehmet lived. The cart was there, and he was playing in the back of it. When he looked up at me, his face brightened into a smile. Then he lifted a hand and waved. “Hello, Canada!” he called merrily. And what could I do but wave back at him? I gave him an uncomfortable grin, then hoisted my backpack higher onto my shoulders.

  A ten-hour bus journey brought me to the sparkling beaches of Ölüdeniz, and there the broad Aegean Sea washed away all my fears. Somewhere else my time of dying would come. Without violence, I hoped, without misfortune or pain. Like everyone else in the world, I want to slip away gently, old and grey, surrounded by the familiar clutter of a well-lived life.

  Oh, and on that particular marathon bus journey, our driver, a jovial man from the far-off Black Sea region, bore a faintly familiar name — Genghis.

  5

  On the Roof of the World

  Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world. I didn’t know that when I first visited the place, though. My plane floated over the green-terraced fields, and I thought everything looked quite nice. The airport at Kathmandu was modern and clean, and even when we were mobbed by street kids wishing to carry our luggage the fifty metres or so to the bus, well, I’d seen that elsewhere many times.

  It was only when we drove into the pockmarked back alleys of Kathmandu that I really began to see the extent of the city’s wretchedness. There was a lot of garbage strewn about, a great deal of decaying concrete scattered everywhere, and far too many skeletal dogs wandering around. Most of all, though, there were the people: hundreds, thousands, millions of lost souls.

  There are now five million people packed into Kathmandu. It didn’t used to be that way. Amit, who was to be our Nepalese guide for the next two weeks of trekking, seemed almost apologetic. He was born in Kathmandu when it was no more than a village. Amit remembered the first television in town and how it was set up outside a butcher shop. Benches were put out, and everyone came to watch as the sky darkened into evening.

  In the late 1960s, hippies discovered Kathmandu. Freak Street is still there, and it’s hard to walk more than a few metres through the tourist district, Thamel, without a rickshaw driver hissing, “Hash? Hash? You want to buy hash?”

  Thamel, in fact, is pretty cool. It’s the base from which most tourists launch their treks along the Annapurna circuit or even up to Base Camp at Mount Everest. But I was going somewhere else. My plan was to hike up and over the mountains into legendary Tibet.

  For many years I’d dreamed of going to Tibet. It’s the ultimate destination for an adventure traveller — the roof of the world, Shangri-La in the remote Himalayas. Eight of the ten highest peaks in the world are in Tibet, including, of course, the dark northern flanks of Mount Everest itself.

  I had arranged to go into Tibet through Nepal, and as fate would have it, I happened to arrive in Kathmandu on the fiftieth anniversary of the first successful climb of Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, his Sherpa guide. Nepal was abuzz with the anniversary celebrations, or at least the climbing community was. The average Nepalese watched from afar, bound in an unbreakable chain of poverty.

  Matters have gotten worse for most Nepalese over the past few years. The average income is about $300 a year, less than a dollar a day, and the government has been in chaos for almost a decade. The entire royal family was massacred in 2001. In the calm dawn hours of a bright June day, a nephew in the royal clan seemingly snapped. He wandered through the palace with an arsenal of semi-automatic weapons and systematically mowed down the king, the queen, the heir apparent, and three other princes and princesses. Some fairy-tale land!

  On top of that, in 1996, much of the country was plunged into a civil war with the Communist Party of Nepal, a neo-Maoist group. They killed about three hundred policemen — mostly in the far-flung western provinces — and were occasionally responsible for bombings in Kathmandu itself. More than twelve thousand people were slaughtered. Eventually, in 2007, the monarchy was abolished, and under a peace deal a year later, elections were held in which th
e Communist Party won the most seats in the new parliament. A little later the communists were ousted, and today uncertainty still prevails in the troubled nation.

  “We have a saying in Nepalese,” Amit told me. “Key gar ney.” This phrase is usually accompanied by a shoulder shrug and one of those wobbly head gestures often found in Hindu countries. It means, quite literally, “What to do? What to do?” But far from being a real cry of helplessness, there’s somehow a touch of humour left in the phrase. Maybe that’s a Hindu thing, an observation that life is often not under our control, and like it or not, that’s the way it is.

  Amit was a good sort. Actually, he was as Western as I was. He was engaged to a girl from London he’d met while leading a trek into India. She had been in the group, and as he told me, it only took a matter of days for them to fall head over heels in love with each other. Beth was her name, and she was moving to Kathmandu to live with Amit. I hoped she knew what she was getting into.

  Still, Amit had it better than most Nepalese, since he worked for a British tour company. He often philosophized about his life. “When I was a young boy in Kathmandu,” he told me, “I never imagined I could have a job like this, that I could be the equal of Westerners. But now the truth is that my life is very confusing. This job takes me away from reality. I go to fabulous places, but I’m not one of the tourists. And when I come home, I’m no longer Nepalese, either.”

  Nepal, he said, was once a great empire encompassing large chunks of Southeast Asia. Buddha, Amit told me, had been born in the time of this vast kingdom. But somehow everything had been frittered away during the past two hundred years. Now Nepal was a tiny remote kingdom — well, not even a kingdom anymore — a backwater of the great Ganges River.

  “Bloody hell!” Amit cried, shaking his head. “Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about what’s happened to us.”

  The Thamel district in Kathmandu is an island removed from all the strife. It was built on the tourist trade. At one of the restaurants there, the Rum Doodle, you get a free meal if you summit Everest. There wasn’t much chance of us doing that, but Amit introduced us, anyway, to his favourite Nepalese snack — momo. He scarfed down these little meat-filled dumplings as if there were no tomorrow, always asking for the “buff” momos. It took us a while to realize that the ground beef inside didn’t come from cows. Since Nepal is a Hindu nation, cattle are sacred and are allowed to lumber down streets with impunity. But water buffalo are another matter.

  The unlucky water buffalo would provide us with all the beef we could consume until we reached Tibet. Then it would be yaks. Yak momos aren’t the greatest delicacy, but they would become a staple of our trip, sizzling over open flames at the top of the world.

  During the next two days, our group arrived one by one at the hotel in Kathmandu. I had never participated in an organized group trek before, but a group visa was the only way I could get into Tibet. Groups also had to be accompanied by a designated government guide, which wouldn’t be Amit. He would be the tour leader, but at the Chinese-held border we’d be met by another guide, something we were all a bit leery about. None of us were too happy at the thought of being saddled with a communist stooge, someone who would ensure that we received the proper party line.

  That was later, though. Now we were in Kathmandu, and Amit was spelling everything out for us. There would be nine of us. Bryan was from Yorkshire and had just returned from skiing to the North Pole. A Norwegian couple, who had already been all over the world, was using this hard-core trek as an unlikely honeymoon. Even our Nepalese guide, Amit, born and raised in Kathmandu, was travelling into Tibet for the very first time.

  The landslide had come hurtling off the mountain, sweeping away the road in front of us. A couple of boulders the size of Volkswagens had rolled onto the thoroughfare only twenty minutes before we arrived. No matter. It was our third landslide that day, and we were getting used to them.

  Our party was in the foothills of the Himalayas, having driven north from Kathmandu. A solitary road comes up through the high passes here. There’s just one way to get into Tibet, and it’s the highest and possibly the most remote highway in the world.

  The rainy season was drawing to a close, which meant water was literally gushing off the green hillsides in sheets. These waterfalls would go on to feed most of the rivers of southern Asia, but for now they were undermining the road and washing away entire hillsides.

  We managed to drive over and around the first two landslides, but this third one was something else. “Key gar ney,” I said, shrugging.

  Amit stared at me for a moment, surprised, then grinned. “You got it!”

  There was nothing we could do except grab our backpacks and hike over the giant boulders. On the other side there was another stranded bus, so we simply swapped vehicles with the passengers there. Our new bus turned around and headed back toward the high passes and the border of Tibet.

  Eventually, we came to a deep gorge. Over it was a narrow bridge from which all motor traffic was banned. On the opposite side was an archway with Chinese characters carved into it.

  Amit grew serious. He had a sheaf of paperwork in his hands, and we followed him across the bridge to a small office. Amit spoke with some guards dressed in the peaked caps of the Chinese military, and out came a young man with a moon face.

  This was Tashi, who would be our Tibetan guide. That’s not his real name, for reasons I’ll explain later. He shook hands with Amit, who wouldn’t turn us over here but would continue as the representative of the last vestiges of Western civilization. In hushed tones they talked. Tashi spoke five languages — Chinese, Tibetan, Hindu, Nepali, and English, as well as a smattering of other dialects from all of the above.

  I was encouraged to see that he was clearly of Tibetan ancestry rather than Chinese. However, we all knew he was the government-appointed guide, and he didn’t seem very friendly, certainly nothing like the jovial Amit. Tashi didn’t really speak to us at all. He sat at the front of the bus and conversed quietly with the driver, never smiling.

  We drove into the green hills above the gorge to the border town of Zhang Mu. In Tibetan it’s called Khasa, but it’s primarily a Chinese border outpost now. That night we didn’t get much sleep. Across the lane from us was a tavern, and deep into the evening the Chinese troops from the border post crooned sad, wailing karaoke tunes. They were young kids, really, who were far from home. The soldiers were posted here for a one-year hitch, or for two years, and they had a word for that — jian. In Mandarin jian means “a thing that’s difficult to do.” I got the idea that the Chinese didn’t wish to be here any more than the Tibetans wanted them there.

  As Buddhism travelled up through the mountain passes into Tibet, Mongolia, and eventually China, it brought with it an unexpected treasure: literacy. Sometime in the ninth century A.D. an Indian monk named Padmansambhava journeyed into Tibet riding on the back of a tiger, as legends say. He proceeded to bring the word of Buddha to these mountain people, transposing much of these new ideas onto an older and more animistic religion called Bön, which means “to invoke,” an interesting shift from “to awake.”

  In Tibet, Padmansambhava composed a number of texts and buried them like hidden treasures deep in the Gampo Hills of central Tibet. They were eventually unearthed years later by the reincarnation of one of his disciples. Among these sacred texts was the Bardo Thötröl, better known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  Actually, it’s an instruction book to be read to a dying person, and to be continuously read — or chanted, really — over a corpse for the twenty-four hours following the actual death. The idea is to comfort and tell the soul what to expect, not only at the actual moment of death but in the period of latency following it, guiding the soul through to the eventual rebirth that will occur. The Bardo Thötröl is, in fact, one of the very first texts of written Tibetan. The word Bardo, for example, is Tibetan and not Sanskrit. Quite literally bar means “in between” and do is an island, referring t
o the “intermediate state” (or “in-between-ness,” for lack of a better term) between one’s death and the incarnation into the next life.

  After a twenty-four-hour period, when the soul has left the body, the body itself is taken to a special designated area for what is called a sky burial. The hair is cut off, not unlike a scalping, and then the body is systematically hacked apart with axes. The various bits, bloody pieces of flesh and bone, are strewn across the rocky ground. Tibetans see nothing disturbing about this. It’s only a disposal, and in a weird way, quite beautiful, since the idea is that the birds of prey —falcons and eagles — fly off with the various bits and pieces, scattering them to the winds.

  Sky burials are still undertaken today, though outsiders are no longer allowed to see them. I was told that tourists, even if accompanied by a Tibetan local, would have rocks thrown at them (quite rightly) if they tried to witness such a sight.

  The reality now is that feral dogs take much of the spoils. Dogs can be particularly ferocious in Tibet. They’re believed to be the reincarnations of failed monks, those poor boys who entered the monastery at the age of seven or eight and lasted only a few years before they couldn’t take it anymore. These boys leave the monastery, and though there’s no great shame in this, the old ways dictate that their next life, as a sort of penance, will be as a dog. The dogs are then allowed, even welcomed back, into the monastery compounds. They’re thought to be returning to make amends.