He that is robbed, not wanting what is stol’n,
Let him not know’t and he’s not robb’d at all.
But it was too steep. Even had we had with us that earlier and better strain of yak, habitual crossers of traditional passes, I do not think we could have taken a camp over that col.
After collecting some spiders and rock fragments we returned to the high camp. We had still to visit the third col which lay between the other two and looked slightly higher. With perhaps as much luck as skill we climbed in dense mist by an intricate corridor, reaching the foot of the final pitch as the mist dissolved. We knew pretty well what to expect this time, and sure enough we looked once more upon the west glacier and beyond it to a mass of undistinguished-looking Tibetan peaks. We had now done our duty. Certainly, for Lloyd, our visits to the three cols held little pleasure, taken up, as they were, with the twiddling of screws, booking of angles, changing plates, all of it having to be done against time. I, on the other hand, once I had recovered from the successive disappointments, had merely to sit munching biscuits while Tensing scrabbled in rock crevices for victims for my Belsen chambers.
Since there was no reaching the unsurveyed territory on the Tibetan side, our survey work had to be confined to the Langtang itself. Nor was this merely painting the lily; for the existing ¼-in. maps published by the Survey of India in 1931 are good only so far as they go. Good enough, that is, to destroy any illusions one might have of being an explorer, all the main peaks having been triangulated and the general run of the main valleys indicated. But the detailed topography of the mountain regions is either not shown or is largely guesswork, thus the glaciers often provided charming surprises and the cols unexpected and puzzling vistas.
The station on this col was the last for some time. Next day, 22 June, when we began moving down, expecting to complete several stations on the way, the weather broke. Monsoon conditions of mist, rain, with rarely any sunshine, established themselves and prevailed almost unbroken for the rest of our stay.
On the way down Tensing and I crossed the main glacier to take a one-night camp up a tributary glacier to the east. The eastern side of the Langtang glacier is a very high wall of mountains unbroken except by this one glacier. Having crossed a high pass at its head, and having gone some way down the other side, we recognized below us the east branch of the Langtang which, after making an abrupt bend close to the two rock images, follows a course almost parallel to the main glacier. Beyond it we noticed yet another col leading southeast, a discovery of which we made good use later when we tried to reach the Jugal Himal. In a sanctuary one would expect to see game, but in this valley alone did we see any – three wary tahr, the rufous, shaggy Himalayan goat. At much lower altitudes we had occasionally seen a small deer which we took to be a musk deer, and on one occasion we had assumed without any strict enquiry the presence of some kindly disposed bears. Apart from that we saw no game, not even a marmot.
Twice, once at sunset and again at dawn, we carried the theodolite to the top of the 500 ft. moraine which in better weather would have made an excellent station, and then in disgust we went straight down to Langtang village. On this stroll, the more pleasant because it was all downhill, we met with a fresh crop of flowers, most of them, like Mr Pyecroft’s lilac, ‘stinkin’ their blossomin’ little hearts out’. Besides the tall ream primulas, nearly 2 ft. high, there were little ground orchids of a delicate pink, bronze bell-shaped fritillaries, copper-coloured lilies, and great hairy yellow poppies. Lurking behind a bush of white briar, clutching a catapult, was a dark, hungry-looking figure, wearing, by way of dazzle camouflage, an American shirt. It was bird-skinner Toni who, with more zeal than sense, had left Bombay without waiting for the release of either stick-gun or ammunition.
MAD (PĀGAL)
Laxmīprasād Devkoṭā
Lakshmīprasād Devkoṭā (1909–1959) was a prolific Nepali author, poet and playwright. Devkoṭā is honoured by the title of Maha Kavi “The Great Poet” in Nepali literature. He wrote more than 40 books and his works also include short stories, essays, translations, a novel and many poems. His notable works include Muna Madan, Kunjini, Sakuntal.
Surely, my friend, I am mad,
that’s exactly what I am!
I see sounds,
hear sights,
taste smells,
I touch things thinner than air,
things whose existence the world denies,
things whose shapes the world does not know.
Stones I see as flowers,
pebbles have soft shapes,
water-smoothed at the water’s edge
in the moonlight;
as heaven’s sorceress smiles at me,
they put out leaves, they soften, they glimmer
and pulse, rising up like mute maniacs,
like flowers – a kind of moonbird flower.
I speak to them just as they speak to me,
in a language, my friend,
unwritten, unprinted, unspoken,
uncomprehended, unheard.
Their speech comes in ripples, my friend,
to the moonlit, Gangā’s shore.
Surely, my friend, I am mad,
that’s exactly what I am!
You are clever, and wordy,
your calculations exact and correct forever,
but take one from one in my arithmetic,
and you are still left with one.
You use five senses, but I have six,
you have a brain, my friend,
but I have a heart.
To you a rose is a rose, and nothing more,
but I see Helen and Padmiṇī
you are forceful prose,
I am liquid poetry;
you freeze as I am melting,
you clear as I cloud over,
and then it’s the other way around;
your world is solid, mine vapour,
your world is gross, mine subtle,
you consider a stone an object,
material hardness is your reality
but I try to grasp hold of dreams,
just as you try to catch the rounded truths
of cold, sweet, graven coins.
My passion is that of a thorn, my friend,
yours is for gold and diamonds,
you say that the hills are deaf and dumb,
I say that they are eloquent.
Surely, my friend,
mine is a loose inebriation,
that’s exactly how I am.
In the cold of the month of Māgh I sat,
enjoying the first white warmth of the star:
the world called me a drifter.
When they saw me staring blankly for seven days
after my return from the cremation ghāṭs,1
they said I was possessed.
When I saw the first frosts of Time
on the hair of a beautiful woman,
I wept for three days:
the Buddha was touching my soul,
but they said that I was raving!
When they saw me dance
on hearing the first cuckoo of Spring,
they called me a madman.
A silent, moonless night once made me breathless,
the agony of destruction made me jump,
and on that day the fools put me in the stocks!
One day I began to sing with the storm,
the wise old men sent me off to Rānchī.2
One day I thought I was dead,
I lay down flat, a friend pinched me hard,
and said, “Hey, madman, you’re not dead yet!”
These things went on, year upon year,
I am mad, my friend,
that’s exactly what I am!
I have called the ruler’s wine blood,
the local whore a corpse,
and the king a pauper.
I have abused Alexander the Great,
poured scorn on so-called great souls,
but the lowly I have raised
to the seventh heaven on a bridge of praise.
Your great scholar is my great fool,
your heaven my hell,
your gold my iron, my friend,
your righteousness my crime.
Where you see yourself as clever,
I see you to be an absolute dolt,
your progress, my friend, is my decline,
that’s how our values contradict.
Your universe is as a single hair to me,
certainly, my friend, I’m moonstruck,
completely moonstruck, that’s what I am!
I think the blind man is the leader of the world,
the ascetic in his cave is a back-sliding deserter;
those who walk the stage of falsehood
I see as dark buffoons,
those who fail I consider successful,
progress for me is stagnation:
I must be either cockeyed or mad –
I am mad, my friend, I am mad.
Look at the whorish dance
of shameless leadership’s tasteless tongues,
watch them break the back of the people’s rights.
When the black lies of sparrow-headed newsprint
challenge Reason, the hero within me,
with their webs of falsehood,
then my cheeks grow red, my friend,
as red as glowing charcoal.
When voiceless people drink black poison,
right before my eyes,
and drink it through their ears,
thinking that it’s nectar,
then every hair on my body stands up,
like the Gorgon’s serpent hair.
When I see the tiger resolve to eat the deer,
or the big fish the little one,
then into even my rotten bones there comes
the fearsome strength of Dadhīchī’s soul,3
and it tries to speak out, my friend,
like a stormy day which falls with a crash from Heaven.
When Man does not regard his fellow as human,
all my teeth grind together like Bhīmsen’s,4
red with fury, my eyeballs roll round
like a half-penny coin, and I stare
at this inhuman world of Man
with a look of lashing flame.
My organs leap from their frame,
there is tumult, tumult!
My breath is a storm, my face is distorted,
my brain burns, my friend, like a submarine fire,
a submarine fire! I’m insane like a forest ablaze,
a lunatic, my friend,
I would swallow the whole universe raw.
I am a moonbird for the beautiful,
a destroyer of the ugly,
tender and cruel,
the bird that steals the fire of Heaven,
a son of the storm thrown up
by an insane volcano, terror incarnate,
surely, my friend, my brain is whirling, whirling,
that’s exactly how I am!
1 A ghāṭ is a stepped platform beside a river where Hindus take their daily baths and where the bodies of the dead are cremated.
2 Rānchī is the mental asylum in Bihār, northern India.
3 According to the Mahābhārata, the magical “diamond-weapon” of Indra, the god of war, was made from a bone of the legendary sage Dadhīchī. Dowson [1879] 1968, 191.
4 Bhīmsen “the terrible” was the second of the five Pāṇḍava princes and was described in the Mahābhārata as an enormous man of fierce and wrathful disposition.
MOUNTAINS PAINTED WITH TURMERIC
Lil Bahadur Chettri
Lil Bahadur Chettri is a Nepali writer from Assam, India. He is a recipient of the Sahitya Academy Award for his book Brahmaputrako Chheu Chhau. He is one of the most successful novelists in Nepali language.
1
This night was not as cold as it usually is in the high hills during the month of Phagun.1 The sky was overcast, and the cold breeze did not blow from the peaks, so the night was still. Although it was the bright half of the month, all the moon’s light could not reach the earth, and there was only just enough light to see by.
From a distance, Dhané Basnet looked as if he were asleep, bundled up from his feet to his head in a dirty quilt that was torn in places. But he was not sleeping. He was trying to set aside the flood of emotion that was tumbling down on him, so that he could welcome the goddess of sleep. But his efforts were all to no avail. One moment he would shut off the flow of thoughts and try to sleep, but the next second those feelings would revive and come back to surround his brain. So Dhané got up, went to the fireplace, plucked out a glowing ember from the ashes, and lit a stub of tobacco wrapped in an angeri leaf. As he blew the tobacco smoke out into the room, he sank back into his thoughts. Questions, objections, answers; and then more questions arose one after the other in each corner of his heart.
“The old baidar2 is prepared to give me a buffalo, but he’s asking a terribly sharp price – and then of course I have to pledge my plowing oxen as security. If I don’t pay off the interest each and every month I’ll get no peace at all. ‘Four-legged is my wealth; do not ever count it,’ they say.3 If anything goes wrong I’ll lose the oxen and everything else as well. But what could go wrong? The buffalo’s pregnant, and she’s already got a sturdy calf. And she gives plenty of milk, too. In a year or two the calf will grow up. And if we get another female calf the next time she gives birth, that will be better still. My little boy will get some milk to wet his throat as well. If we put a little aside for a few days we’ll have ghee, and we’ll surely make a few annas.4 That would be enough to pay the interest, and we’ll keep the buttermilk. If the maize is good this year I’ll use it to pay off half the debt, and we’ll just live on millet.” His thoughts raced by like a powerful torrent. When the tobacco was all gone, Dhané, “the wealthy one,”5 wrapped himself in his quilt again. Half the night had passed already, and he yawned.
2
Dhan Bahadur Basnet is a young man: he has just turned twenty-five. His frame attests to the mountain air and the nutritious food of his homeland, but his handsome face is always darkened by clouds of worry, like black clouds sullying a clear night. He has just one life companion: his wife, Maina, who supports him through his times of sorrow and rejoices when he is happy. In Maina’s lap there plays the star of Dhané’s future, a three-year-old boy. The family also includes a girl of fourteen or fifteen, Dhané’s youngest sister, Jhumavati, whose marriage Dhané has not yet arranged because of his financial difficulties. The boat of Dhané’s household bobs along bearing its little family of four, facing many storms on the unfathomed seas of the world.
Dhané’s crisis may be likened to the black clouds and moon of this night. The moon wants to cut through the net of clouds and spread light throughout the world, making it blissful in the cool soft joy it provides. But it is unable to do so: the clouds have reduced its light to nothing. Dhané wants to burst through the net of his money problems and bring his little family happiness and the cool shade of peace. He longs to restore the foundations of the roofpoles and posts that the termites of his debts to the moneylenders have made rickety. For that he has relied on his industry and labor. He works hard, he is industrious. For every four cowries6 he is willing to lay down a bet on the last breath of his life. But his hardships do not change.
The rotting posts of his house just go on rotting. Like mist rising up to join the clouds, the land owners and moneylenders of the village add to his problems. The sharp interest rates they charge, the way they snatch the security pledged if a promise is broken: in Dhané’s life these are like the blows of staves on a man who is already unconscious. But despite all this he has not admitted defeat. He hides his sorrows and goes on treading the path of labor.7
3
“Hariram! The price of the buffalo is 120 rupees, the interest must be delivered to Hariram’s house at the end of every mo
nth. And listen! If you are late by even a day during the months that you owe money to Hariram, I tell you I’ll remove the oxen and the buffalo from your shed! There, what do you say? Make a mark with your thumb on the agreement.” So said the baidar, who wore a fresh mark of white sandalwood paste on his brow.
The baidar was an old man, a firm traditionalist who paid great attention to matters of purity and touchability. He ate nothing that had not been prepared by his own Bahun cook. So that the name of Ram might always be on his lips, he sprinkled everything he said with his pet word, “Hariram.” His mornings passed in ritual and scripture, and he considered the giving of alms and feasts to Bahuns to be the highest duty. But he was always on his guard when the poor and suffering of the neighborhood came to borrow something petty. He did not forget to crank up the interest when someone borrowed a rupee or two, and the wages for all his hard work were earned by extracting high rates of interest from his creditors. Dhané knew the baidar well. Even though he knew that dealing with him was like setting his own house alight, he held his peace and made his mark on the paper.
It was time to let the livestock out to graze. The farm workers were making their way down to the fields, carrying baskets and ghums.8 Dhané came back to his yard, dragging the little calf behind him. The buffalo brought up the rear, bellowing as it came. Maina hurriedly scattered a handful of hay to one side of the yard, and the buffalo sampled it casually.
4
Dhané expected to profit from the buffalo in every way. “After a year or two my bad days will be over and my good days will begin,” he thought. But if things always worked out as they were envisaged, no one in the world would ever have blamed fate for anything. It was only about two weeks since Dhané had bought the buffalo. He came out that morning to milk it, carrying a milk pail with a little butter smeared on its rim. He went over to untie the calf, but then he saw that it was lying with its legs spread out and that one of its legs was quivering. He had tethered the calf in a hurry the previous evening, and when he saw it like this he nearly lost his senses. He told Maina and then went up the hill to call Kahila Dhami from the big house.9 The dhami came quickly, and when he had fingered the grains of rice in the tray for a long time he said, “It seems that Bankalé has got it.10 You just light incense for the deities of the house, and I’ll conduct an exorcism.”
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