Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  Jann, unhappy with the enterprise, is helped up onto a second small white mare that, Mahendra tells her, is the rani’s personal mount, and although she seems momentarily cheered to be riding the queen’s horse, the honor quickly fades into a type of punishment Jann had not foreseen. The horse, graced with a comalike docility, won’t move. The Bangkok Bachelors are led to a handsome pair of good-size “blue” geldings, the Loba description for gray-coated horses. For a guy who’s never been on a horse, Michael, loose and gangly, pours well into his saddle and assumes a very credible slouch, the veteran of many cavalry charges down Bangkok’s Pamdong Road toward the front lines of hedonism. We all watch expectantly as the dandy Captain Jack, an air force intelligence officer during the Vietnam War, is led to the second blue by Mahendra and his left boot placed carefully in the stirrup. The captain takes a moment to gesture grandiosely and, being a well-read fellow, pronounce a bon mot or two. Then, as he attempts to mount the blue, a type of well-meaning struggle takes place between Mahendra and the captain, which climaxes with the horrifying sight of Jack catapulting completely over the horse, Tomay breaking the fall before the captain breaks his neck. A second attempt seems as if it will prove equally disastrous, but at the last moment before flying off the captain awakens to the moment and grabs the horse’s mane, and Tomay slides a stirrup over his right boot. Mahendra, intimately aware of the perils that await us on our journey, looks ashen, and you wouldn’t blame him for coming to the conclusion that we are not, by the most basic criteria, serious people.

  The liaison officer sits rigidly atop Mahendra’s own white pony; without fanfare or guidance, Laird mounts a large, sturdy walnut-brown gelding. The remaining two horses are the biggest and the smallest of the herd, the most spirited and the most ridiculous: by Tibetan standards, a huge white prancing gelding named Jamling, and, by petting zoo standards, a round, diminutive chestnut mare with a graying face that, after our first river crossing, we will rename Submarine. I glance over at blond-haired Mark, shorter than I and lighter by forty pounds, and shrug. Mark sits astride Submarine like a sullen, overgrown child on a sawhorse, his legs almost scraping the ground.

  The king’s horseman has a look of grave concern on his otherwise optimistic face as we approach Jamling. He wants to be reassured that I know what I’m doing; I flip up the saddle carpets and begin, until Tomay takes over, to lower the stirrups to their last notch. The horse tosses its head; Mahendra seizes the reins. Tibetan horses were never bred to carry tall, bulky Westerners like myself.

  I raise my foot to the stirrup and test my weight against the saddle, trying to determine if it is too loose and will rotate when I mount, and Tomay wisely exerts his own weight against the opposite stirrup. The moment I’m in the air, Jamling sidesteps nervously; my pack shifts, knocking me off balance, and the horse lurches, but I flip my leg over its rump and hold tight, grabbing the reins and pulling the bit back through its skull until the horse’s nose is on my knee and it cha-chas backward into the other mounts, who begin biting one another. This acting up, I know, can go on for a while before a high-spirited horse resigns itself to a rider, but before I can subdue Jamling, Mahendra grabs the lead rope and halter and escorts the horse to the front of the pack, where it settles down.

  “This horse likes to go,” says Mahendra.

  “He’s all right,” I say. I like to go too.

  And just like that, we are moving out, down the bankside and out of town and onto the rocky floodplain of the Kali Gandaki. Cowgirl muscles through the scrum until she walks head to tail with Jamling; the blues jostle side by side behind her, trading places every ten seconds, unrestrained by their riders. Tom hangs back with his wife to offer encouragement and soothe her anxiety. Mark straggles aboard the sluggish Submarine, and Mahendra, who handed off Jamling’s lead rope to Tomay, dashes along the line like a frantic mother duck, attempting to convince himself, I presume, that he has not lost his mind by mounting up such a dubious band of queri. And although I am at the head of the caravan, it exasperates me to no end that I am being led, however merrily, by Tomay. After five minutes of picking my way across the rocks, I rein Jamling to a stop, summon forward Laird and Mahendra, and object.

  Although I had deferred to Laird’s experience on most things Mustang, in our months of planning I had initially nixed the use of horses because of the expense, yet Tom had persuaded me not only that we would fail to get through the upper gorge without them but that there were social and cultural perceptions to be attended to, and that without horses, and good ones, we would be looked down upon by the class-conscious Lobas, for whom the horse is a traditional embodiment of prestige, and lose respect among the very people we would need to depend on for our well-being. Well of course, I thought cynically, a few hundred yards out on the Kali Gandaki floodplain, the king and his court are certainly going to think less of us if we don’t pay them a fortune for their horses.

  Laird and Mahendra have come up, surprised to find me snarling. “This is like a pony ride for a six-year-old at the circus,” I explain, “and if that’s the way it’s going to be, I’d rather walk.” Mahendra purses his lips at my unseemly anger and gives Laird a quizzical look, awaiting a translation while I rave on. “Is this horse uncontrollable?” I demand. “If it is, let’s go back to Jomsom and swap it out of the pack for another.”

  Mahendra blinks with innocence, understanding the gist of the problem: How much might he trust my horsemanship? Straight-faced and guileless, he directs his answer at Tom. “I rode it myself from Lo Manthang.”

  “Then I’m riding it too,” I say resolutely, taking the lead rope from Tomay to loop into the saddle straps. I jam my heels into Jamling’s ribs and off we go again, set free. My wife, who’s been wheeling Cowgirl in circles trying to make her stop, comes trotting ahead but Jamling will not let her pass, and I have no inclination to rein him in. Still, we can move across the difficult clutter of the stony riverbed only marginally faster than a man can walk, and, at least for today, the horses are in control and obey their own hierarchy of prejudice and competition.

  Here at the end of the dry season, the river is down to only a fraction of its width, though by no means feeble, its dark flow contained in a serpentine channel that bends sluggishly across the plain from one side of the canyon to the other. We are immediately sobered by the desolation we ride into, its lifeless, lunar magnitude, the dense stacking of scorched, scoured mountains, so unwelcoming, we had quickly learned, that even the Maoists were giving Mustang a wide berth. Ahead of us, dust storms and dust devils form and unform like writhing spirits. Fortunately, judging from the bent, hooded faces and invalid steps of the infrequent trekkers and pilgrims staggering down the canyon toward the refuge of Jomsom, the wind, which I judge to be a steady thirty-five miles per hour, is at our backs, which intermittently receive a buckshot blast of rain although we’re riding into a furnace of high-altitude sun.

  Behind us, horses and riders are spread in a line for perhaps a quarter mile; perhaps another quarter mile behind the last riders comes our mule train, angling up out of the plain toward the cliffside trail. We have lost sight of Jomsom and its modern comforts, but the panorama of the Himalayas remains unobstructed, and what I see up in the heights when I turn in the saddle is worrisome—a massive storm dropping east off Dhaulagiri, plugging the breach and consuming the Annapurnas. The clockwork monsoons are two weeks premature, and it’s unusual to find this much weather nudging into the rain shadow this early. The river rises measurably every afternoon from snowmelt, and surely any precipitation on the Tibetan plateau in the coming days will complicate our return journey.

  Out come the sweaty rain jackets, Mahendra and Tomay hovering nearby to assist those of us who can’t quite manage the acrobatics of removing our packs and donning clothes while on horseback, in a wind strong enough to blow an inattentive rider out of the saddle. The trail across the rocks is patchy but easy to follow, or not follow, as you please, and the sure-foot
ed horses, invested in their steady clopping plod, pay close attention to the endless supply of next steps, sometimes faltering with indecision. After several rugged hours in the wind and rocks, our exhilaration is muffled but we’re enjoying a Class B sort of sore-assed, mindless fun, occasionally glancing up at the footpath chiseled high into the cliffside and happy to not be on it.

  So far the Kali Gandaki has remained mostly invisible, playing by itself in some other part of the neighborhood, but now it cuts a swath toward the eastern wall of the canyon; its hissing penetrates the throaty drone of the wind, and we can smell its stone-wet iciness. The trail branches, straight to the fording, right to the wall. Ever-vigilant Mahendra hobbles across the rocks to stop me. In any language, the meaning of Mahendra’s words would be self-evident—the river here is too dangerous to cross; we have to go up. Well and good, but we are only a dozen feet above the rapids when Mahendra halts again, pointing ahead to where the canyon wall is raw and sagging, scooped out by recent landslides. “Go fast down this section,” he says, his eyes alarmingly wide, and before I know it he bolts across the slides, dashing under the sickening, rotting overhangs in a crouch, like a soldier sprinting across Snipers Alley. My level of alertness skyrockets into focus. I pass the word down the line, their view of the horror obscured by the rise and dip of the path, then kick Jamling down and through this boobytrap at a brisk walk, preventing him from trotting out of the fear that a trotting horse sends sharper vibrations into the unstable ground than a walking horse, and that the last riders might find themselves the victims of our haste. There are many ways to kill yourself in the Himalayas, and here by God is one of them.

  Horse by horse, we cross to safety without incident, our senses humming, but the real terror waits just ahead. Returning to the floodplain, before too long we have been pressed back against the canyon wall by the bending river and dismount at the base of a stair of boulders, threaded by a narrow trail rising steeply to a landing some fifty or sixty feet above the bed. I do not yet believe or trust in the horses wholeheartedly, as I will in the days to come, and I truly doubt that these animals, which are not goats, powerful but not spry, deft but not limber, can ascend this vertical, rock-studded path without wings, or a crane to lift them. But in this case, to be wrong is to be astonished, and delighted, by the skill of the Tibetan horse.

  Up the horses go, like dogs at the circus climbing ladders; we scramble behind them, clumsy apes, and remount on the flat shelf where the path worms out along the bulge of the cliffside. Mahendra smiles, pleased, but offers no forewarning. I lead us with some confidence out over a drop of hundreds of feet to the rocks and rivers below, and although the path is broad enough to accommodate mistakes of footing, it isn’t long before the margin for error recedes to zero, the path attenuates, the up slope and the down slope sheer off, and I find myself the point man in a nightmare, riding a horse high on a cliffside along an eighteen-inch-wide trail of crushed rock, the river slurping the base of the wall far beneath me. To the left, I would be required to dismount into thin air. To the right, should the need arise, I could only dismount by pushing my horse over the brink, where it would splatter like a watermelon on the stones below. Jamling’s hooves boot pebbles into the abyss.

  My heartbeat thunders; my eyes swim when I chance to look down. I lack the composure to turn in the saddle for a glance behind me, to judge the welfare of my height-freaked wife and companions. You don’t rope together horses as you might climbers on an icefall. We are, at times like this, woefully alone, outside the circle of a helping hand, and if we perish, we perish separately, for traveling through the vastness as we are breeds a powerful inwardness, a sense of solitude that seems a counterpoint to our collective destiny. Nothing we queri do out here requires much teamwork, and at least while we’re in motion, the most intimate bond that forms is between horse and rider.

  For twenty minutes the horses defy gravity, stepping with unflappable determination along the slippery thin line of catastrophe. When we finally descend to flat earth, I pull back on Jamling and take a minute to see how the crew has fared. Laird, a veteran of these canyons, is flushed with the nostalgia of previous risks. My wife, grim and gasping, admits she rode blind along the precipice, reins loose, eyes wide shut, and the stalwart Cowgirl in control. Jann, all nerves and still trembling, swears she’ll never do anything like that again, and she means it. The wasted Bangkok Bachelors dozed through the entire drama, dreaming of nurses and gin-and-tonic IVs. For Mark, the geriatric, unwilling Submarine succeeded in making even this, the Pony Ride from Hell, tedious and slightly boring. Our liaison officer, an accountant by training and an immigration officer by necessity, is pale and grumbling. His fifth trip to Mustang, he can’t figure out what the attraction is. By mutual agreement, he will leave us in the morning and, without informing his superiors, return gratefully to his family in Pokhara. He is a bureaucrat, not an adventurer, a useless, inept, and frightened member of the expedition, and in a corrupt and violence-torn nation, his actual presence with us is pointless and the pretense of that presence a meaningless transgression.

  More than four hours out from Jomsom, wind-blasted and parched, our asses and knees terribly sore, we arrive at the beautiful mud-and-stone village of Kagbeni, the last outpost before the restricted area of Upper Mustang, and dismount on a knoll above shockingly green terraces of barley. Mahendra and Tomay lead the horses to pasture, and, stiff-legged, we enter the town’s medieval warren of streets beneath flapping rows of prayer flags, past turnip-shaped chortens and tea shops serving apple pie, apple cake, apple crumble, past a satellite dish and a huge protector deity with an erect wooden penis. Whooping and hollering, four teenage boys jog around a corner into my path; with both hands, one holds a painted clay god above his head, one wields an ax, and the other two slash the air with shiny butcher knives. Whatever hash of mythologies they’re working with I can’t say. We exchange nods and they run on to complete a ritual I can hardly imagine. Eventually at the top of town we find the Red House Inn, our lodging for the night, where we reunite with Ang Tsering and the Sherpas. By twilight the mule train arrives, the wind calms, and Chhundi, our artist in residence, has taken over the kitchen. Dandelions of light appear throughout the town’s darkness; Kagbeni has had the pleasure of electricity for only one year, and a television flickers blue in the house below the tearoom where we sprawl. Three foreigners, like us on the way up-canyon to Lo Manthang, share the inn for the night. The youngest is a twenty-one-year-old, rosy-cheeked Swede, full of enthusiasm and energy and charm.

  “Why are you reading that book?” Laird asks him gruffly, pointing to his copy of Michel Peissel’s Mustang: A Lost Tibetan Kingdom, the account of the French ethnologist’s 1964 journey to Lo Manthang. It seems Laird’s subtext here is, Why aren’t you reading my book, you hatchling? “It’s almost forty years old! It’s ancient history.”

  “Yes,” says the kid, whose untested life is floating on the perfect answer, “but it makes you dream.” Ah, Laird grins and mimes a swoon, falling back in love again with the concept of youth, this 2001 model of his yearning, footloose boyish self.

  In the rough beds of our fatigue, we fall asleep dreaming of the dull brass chorus of horse bells, an echo, a lightness, fresh in our ears, the world so far away.

  Wandervogel

  His father was a Mississippi cracker, a tech sergeant in the air force, sent to Vietnam; his mother was a frustrated artist who quit cooking and started going away for the summers to Provincetown to paint. Their son Tom was pounded on all the time by the other kids, changing schools five times in Florida and Tennessee and St. Louis; by the time he was twelve he was reading Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard and considered himself an unrepentant atheist. Graduating from high school at seventeen with no discernible honors, he understood that he hated his father, hated everything about America as well, and told his mother there was no sticking around, that whatever he was going to do in this life he wasn’t going to do it here in the S
outh, or in his parents’ orbit. He didn’t know where that place was where he would meet his destiny, but within a week of graduation he left to find it. Three times, he hitchhiked back and forth between Florida and San Francisco. Delaying college for what he thought would be a year and not a lifetime, he saved money for a trip to Europe working the night shift at a cardboard box factory in Murfreesboro, where his sister lived, and started reading Hemingway, Kerouac, Huxley. Within a year of high school, he was in Nepal and never came back.

  Tom Laird was, in 1972, part of the great transcontinental traveling freak show that began in the States and Europe, pirouetted its way across the Bosporus into Asia, followed the Silk Road or the Spice Trail into India, and finally nestled into Kathmandu, where it became infamously known as the Rock and Roll Raj. From London to Paris to Rome to Athens, Laird became slowly infatuated with his mother’s supreme passion, art—the Babylonian display at the Louvre, the evolution of angels evident to the attentive eye in every museum in Europe, the inexplicable sensation that Michelangelo was speaking to him as he gazed adoringly at the Pietà at the Vatican. On the Spanish Steps he purchased a copy of French adventurer Alexandra David-Neel’s Magic and Mystery in Tibet, an extremely inaccurate, romanticized account of Tibetan Buddhism, almost a nineteenth-century fantasy, but it gave him the dream of remote kingdoms where diamonds lay about on the ground. It was the classic wandervogel reinvented by the counterculture, the Grand Tour with free sex and psychedelics, kids looking for themselves and opening doors into their snow-white consciousness, but by the time Laird arrived on the islands of Greece he was fed up with Europe, it was too much like America, and on Santorini he met a Jewish kid who had just returned from Kathmandu who told him he could go overland to Nepal on public transport for sixty bucks. Laird had four hundred, with which he could either make his way back home or continue forward.