Total population, 15,492, although only a third of those people live in Upper Mustang. Serfdom abolished, more or less, in 1956. In the late ’50s, Tibetan refugees fleeing across the border brought with them large herds of sheep, goats, and yaks, overgrazing the high-altitude pastures. Equally problematic for daily life in Mustang, in 1960 the kingdom became the base of operations for the Khampa guerrillas from eastern Tibet and their doomed, CIA-sponsored war against the Chinese occupation of their homeland.
Mustang ranks among the most unspoiled wilderness areas in the world, home to the snow leopard and a variety of other rare and endangered species. Loba society practices a polyandrous marriage system. A woman has two or three husbands, usually brothers. And here’s a Loba saying: “A woman with two husbands laughs, and a man with two wives cries.” The last sign I read is handwritten on a scrap of paper and tacked to a post—BEWARE OF MASTIFFS IN LO MANTHANG, FOUR PEOPLE HAVE BEEN BITTEN.
We shake hands and bid farewell to our liaison Raju, happy as a prisoner being paroled, promising we won’t stray from our route, shoot wild animals, chop firewood, liberate Tibet, or otherwise misbehave, and that we will check in at the police garrison in Lo Manthang the minute we arrive. We regather in the sunlight on the parapet overlooking the canyon, where three gleeful little boys at the water pipe play with a green condom, slinging it at one another, until a townswoman passing by sees what they’re doing and smacks them and they rub their close-cropped heads and bawl and we’re off.
The way out of town descends a steep slope to the riverbed, and at its bottom Mahendra and Tomay wait with the horses. A minor rebellion ensues. Laird mounts up and so do the recovering Bangkokers (once again, Tomay saves the captain from flinging himself headfirst over the saddle into a concussion). Ang Tsering has never been to Mustang, and never ridden a horse, but wants to try it out. Jann is adamant about walking, and Mark, disappointed in Submarine, seems to feel the same. The stirrups have aggravated Cat’s old knee injury and she thinks the exercise will do her good. Myself, I’m wondering if there are fossils in the millions of rocks underfoot. Mahendra cocks his head and shrugs, bewildered—it doesn’t make sense to walk across this blazing, ankle-twisting wasteland if you don’t have to, but some foreigners, he has observed, are essentially stubborn and stupidly dedicated to unnecessary hardship.
The horsemen ride ahead. The rest of us, we walk, we trudge, we straggle across the immense, vacant floodplain, empty and quiet, stupefied by the heat and the scenery, mere particles of animation to anyone glancing down from the mesas high atop the canyon. I lag behind the general pace, picking up rocks and throwing them down like a crazy person, searching for saligrams—the smooth, blackish, ovoid stones containing ammonite fossils, considered sacred by Hindus and Buddhists alike. I pocket two small but likely candidates but Laird later tells me no, we’re too low in the canyon, and these are what the Lobas call “cold eggs,” the right shape and color but without the surface aberration that signals a fossil within.
After a mile or so the river forces us back to the horses for our first water crossing, an unremarkable event, accomplished without incident. By now we have joined up with a second group of riders, the only other people we’ve seen since Kagbeni. We ride together for perhaps an hour, telling one another who we are, where we’re going, where we’re from. They are Lobas, headed to Lo Manthang for the festival, as we are—a young monk in his garnet robes, sent away ten years ago to study in India, plus his sister and uncle, who have ridden down to Jomsom to meet him and another uncle who sells cloth in Assam while his wife tends the house and fields in Lo Manthang. Their company, like all encounters on the lonely trail ahead, where you can go all day without seeing another face, eases the monotony of the journey, blooming and dissolving with agreeable conversation, and then they are gone, or rather we are, turning up from the riverbed to the village of Chuksang to deal with a logistics problem that now must be resolved.
To enter the upper gorge, we need extra horses for two days for the Sherpas and camp staff, who cannot otherwise accompany us without great difficulty, and we need packhorses to carry the staff’s heavy baskets of gear and the extra feed required by the extra horses and mules. These we expect to rent in Chuksang from a local wrangler. When it seems the negotiations are going to take some time, the walkers—that would now be everybody but the Bang Boys—decide to go on to Chele, marching through the shade-cool apple orchards of the village and back down to the river. (By the time the full party moves out, we constitute, according to Chuksang’s headman, the biggest caravan he has ever seen heading up-canyon—twenty-two horses and fourteen mules.)
In our slog to Chele, for us nothing more than a bridge of decaying planks suspended across the river, we come of age as (illegal) saligram hunters, meandering aimlessly across the gullies and washes and bars of the receded Kali Gandaki, zombies in the wind tuned to an inner voice whispering, Fill your backpack with rocks so you’ll drown in the river. We wander alone, mesmerized by the naked planet, glancing up intermittently to note our companions off in the distance. To find whole saligrams, rather than shards, one must summon a bit of aggression, and expect to be bloodied for it. Serendipity directs you to just the right grenadelike rock in the zillions lying around; you pick it up, find a bigger rock, and pitch the one in your hand against it with all you’ve got. If your luck holds, the rock will burst open with neat, clean lines, like a jewelry box, and for the first time in 150 million years, one of earth’s earliest creatures is exposed to sunlight, its nautilus-like whorls sparkling with golden crystals. If, on the other hand, your luck is somehow deficient, the rock you pitched, or a razor-sharp fragment of it, comes zinging back like a line drive and takes you out.
Both Mark and I arrive at the Chele footbridge wounded; all of us arrive sweating and shivering, thanks to the drastic swings in temperature throughout the morning, a fan of clouds opening and closing over the sun. For the second day the southern horizon is blackened by storms, which threaten to slip off the Himalayas and engulf us.
Chele, out of sight above us on a mesa to the west, marks the end of the dry weather route up the riverbed from Jomsom. Anyone continuing north must climb out of the canyon here on the main trail leading to Lo Manthang, or have exited earlier at Chuksang to track a punishing goat path around the eastern side of the upper gorge to Tange, where the canyon broadens out again. We stand for a moment awestruck by the gorge’s portal, to our left a dislodged block of canyon wall that looks like the top third of a World Trade Center tower, to our right a sheer red-rock face rising out of the river with an inaccessible line of man-made caves about 150 feet up, and then the river itself, burrowing ahead about a hundred yards until the opposite walls seem to clap together, as if we are about to enter a subway tunnel in this Manhattan of solid stone. We stare uncertainly at the river’s muscle and force as it races from the gorge and then get out of the rising wind to play listlessly with our packed lunch of eggs gone rotten and curried potatoes.
Our mules finally arrive, and all the extras, and the extra wrangler, the dashing Rajendra on his dashing white pony, prince of the upper gorge, and his sidekick, a half-clothed kid who looks about thirteen, and there’s much hubbub, biting, and head butting, a lot of kicking and attempted run-aways. Ang Tsering, who didn’t care for his inaugural experience on a horse earlier this morning, encourages the Sherpas to mount up for the first time ever and it’s clear, as the mountaineers sway and slip and bounce like rag dolls, that they were not born for the saddle. Mahendra, on a white horse half the size of Jamling, trots up to the front of this scrum and then we’re off, splashing into the dark glacial water, and the column of our enterprise is so long and winding and in different time zones that it’s not until the next day that I learn how we barely averted disaster right at the start, when Biri was unsaddled as his horse dropped off the bar into the river but grabbed by his terrified comrades before he was swept away. Sherpas, and porters in general, as you might expect, g
iven their customary occupation—not riding horses through rivers in Mustang—don’t know how to swim.
The sky itself has been reduced to a blue serpent held overhead in the jaws of the gorge, and when we are not sheltered by the nearness of the bulging walls, the sun pours down on us with dazing intensity. If the Grand Canyon is geology’s Rome, the upper reach of the Kali Gandaki is its Athens, less grand but more finessed, elegantly sculpted and ethereal. We ride through amphitheaters and stacked galleries, through vaulted passageways with pigeons and swallows nesting along narrow ledges; we ride past grotesque monuments to the fury of water and sinuous curtains of rock carved by the persistent wind, past Olympian thrones, past soaring temples as long as city blocks, and always, always, we are in and out of the rushing river, which sometimes fills its bed from wall to wall.
At the fordings, Mahendra pauses to consult with the horseman from Chuksang; their dark eyes read the flow, determining entries and exits. Sometimes he and Rajendra will ask the column to wait while they ride ahead to test the bottom, and at every crossing Mahendra wants us to strictly follow his line into the rapids, often completing the ford and coming back to position himself midstream, down current, as insurance. Most of the fords are relatively shallow, but before long we come to our first deep crossing, the current shouldering the horses with real force. I can feel Jamling struggling to keep his footing, the brief loss of gravity each time he lifts a leg until, my hand wrapped into his mane to keep from falling backward, he thrashes up the steep, crumbling gravel bank of the opposite shore. Behind me I watch my wife and Mark entering the river, Submarine earning his name, the dark water foaming above Mark’s knees. They’ve allowed their horses’ heads to turn downstream and are losing ground with each step, inching toward violent water, and I shout to them to rein the horses at an angle upriver, so that they fight the current, rather than submit to it, as they move across. The Bangkok Bachelors, loath to discipline their horses or themselves, plunge ahead, crashing into each other and whomever else might be in the way. Still on the far bank, the queen’s horse refuses to budge, despite Jann’s pleading, until Laird whaps its hindquarter. Halfway back on the bar come the bedraggled Sherpas, and the lead mule, its colorful plume bobbing above its ears, is just in sight around the bend, the mule skinners with their pants tied around their necks, having no choice but to wade belly-deep into the ice-cold torrent.
Again and again, we ford the river, so many crossings that I lose count after thirty-five, kicking the reluctant horses into the flow, holding tight as they scramble out, Mahendra singing to calm his nervousness, Rajendra whooping with cowboy joy, because we are an impressive sight, so many people, so many animals, picking their way through the spectacular gorge. Only once am I flushed with alarm, when my horse and Cat’s step into the same hole, lose their footing, and threaten to go down. The most dangerous part of the passage is not in the river but out of it, when we encounter one river bend too extreme to ford and must dismount to walk our horses up a steep, rocky bankside to a shelf of hardened slurry, around and down a pile of boulders, and back to the river.
Atop the shelf, Jann barely escapes being crushed when her horse sits to roll in the sand. Everybody’s boots are waterlogged, our asses are raw, our backs stiff, knees throb, and our legs are unsteady. My wife, off her horse, is crippled, her left leg swollen, and as I help her through the rubble I dislodge a forty-pound rock that nearly breaks her ankle. By the time we regain the river, we’re beginning to show the stress of the journey, our brains going numb with the mantra of the horse bells ringing out into the overwhelming emptiness of the landscape.
Late in the afternoon, the fords get deeper, colder, and the wind sharpens. We pass several good campsites with room enough for the livestock but none seems to be, in Laird’s memory, the Matthiessen campsite, which he is obsessed with finding but it’s been ten years. The sun lowers and we push on despite the advice of Mahendra and Ang Tsering, because Rajendra keeps assuring Laird that the site he’s looking for is just ahead. It isn’t. The day has been rugged and dramatic and exhausting, twilight sinks into the gorge, and finally we’re stuck for the night at a cramped, eroded campsite that appeals to none of us—a narrow ten-foot-high flood shelf with an abrupt drop to a rock-strewn shoreline.
Now the wind howls, lashing our faces with sheets of dust from off the platform of dried mud where the mules and horses have their legs in the air, rolling on their backs. Scouting around, I discover a small riverside cave, the perfect spot to pitch our tent, I think, but then the wind bowls into it and a cloud of grit and sand stings me as if I’ve disturbed a hornet’s nest. The Sherpas attempt to pitch the kitchen tent on the gravel below the shelf but it blows over. We’re all getting pissed about pushing too far and ending up with only this—no shelter from the brutal and increasingly cold wind. Laird and I have a short, tense discussion about how we might possibly arrive at decisions that are more agreeable. Mark waddles behind a rock with dysentery. My wife’s wet boots have given her the shakes, and she can’t bend her left knee. The Sherpas are maxed out, and I find Rajendra and the mule skinners huddled in the gloom behind a boulder, half-naked, soaked and freezing. Somebody starts a campaign to round up dry socks for these guys—they have no socks at all. “This is no time to be socially sensitive,” someone snaps. “It’s always time to be socially sensitive,” someone else says back. Cat and I slip away to hit the vodka.
The tents are finally pitched, the guylines weighted down with huge rocks. The mule skinners’ new high-tech socks are delivered with packets of M&Ms; naturally they throw the trash on the ground, not because they’re morons but because what does it matter here at the absolute center of nowhere, where cheap tennis shoes are the only litter we’ve seen for two days. The mules are hobbled for the night, their faces stuffed into feed bags. Mahendra has taken the horses back downriver in search of forage, where he and Tomay will sleep with the herd to keep them from running off. Thanks to the intrepid Sherpas, camp is set, a latrine dug, wash water provided, tea made, a dinner of spaghetti and mashed potatoes served; the wind dies down, everything’s good again, and we separate into the starry darkness and collapse into our sleeping bags.
In the morning, after a round of ibuprofen cocktails with our porridge, we expect another long, demanding haul through the second half of the gorge to our day’s destination, the village of Tange. Jamling, as is his habit, vies for the lead and I have to rein him back to allow Mahendra to trot forward on his pony. Within an hour even the Lobas are amazed when the canyon flares open in front of us, providing the strange sense that we have exited an Earth-size small intestine into the large intestine, which shits us out who knows where. The upper canyon between the gorge and Tange is as rarely traveled as the gorge itself, but the difference in habitat is striking. The inner gorge, too severe to support wildlife, void even of insects, was as biologically dead as it was geologically lush, but here in the high canyon the air above us stirs with the satin rustle of feathers—the ubiquitous ravens certainly, and now eagles and hawks, enormous condors and vultures. Animal tracks lead from the riverbed up the austere slopes; four blue sheep study our caravan from a ledge high atop a palisade, and when we dismount to collect a few saligrams, which are everywhere, my wife identifies the print of a young brown bear (Ursus arctos) faintly pressed in the dry mud. Here too are hundreds and hundreds of man-made caves high on the canyon walls, undisturbed for centuries or perhaps millennia, Mustang’s last great mystery.
The first argument of the day is about lunch—Shall we stop here? Here? No, says Mahendra, uncustomarily peevish. He’s intent on another place he thinks he remembers where there’s a windbreak and better grazing, but when we go ahead, no such place seems to exist. We stop anyway, craving the shade in the basin of a sandy amphitheater, a need almost immediately cast aside by the changing atmosphere. “What happened?” Mahendra says after lunch, surveying the torrent with a grave expression. “The river is high and black.” Barbarian clouds
sweep in, a monsoon front has successfully assaulted the Himalayas, and the weather takes a dramatic, wintery turn as we turn ourselves into a side canyon and ride ahead bowed over our horses to the beautiful, stunningly primitive oasis of Tange, population 140 souls who might as well be living on Mars.
A long ramp rising up the escarpment off the floodplain of two merging rivers leads to the village and we ascend into the greening of the desert, awed by the laborious magic of the terraced fields. The exotic fragrance of wet earth wafts from the ancient irrigation ditch, its banks thicketed by yellow rose of Sharon, poplar trees, and, the closer we get to Tange, big cottonwoods. The ground turns grassy, then marshy; the marsh expands to a small pond, and beyond that we bivouac in a stone-walled corral at the entrance of the town, a weird and marvelous place.
To describe Tange and other equally remote hamlets in Mustang as neglected would be politically accurate but metaphysically inadequate. Ditto with forgotten, which implies substantial foreknowledge. Even lost would not be enough. The humanity here is like a seed in a prelapsarian garden, borne by the primal wind an unfathomable distance from its source, to root in complete oblivion. Like ghosts, we appear from an unseen world, passing through a corridor of high walls. At the first house we come to, a stooped, gray-haired ama cringes at the sight of us. “We’re afraid,” she cries, her voice flutelike. “Go. Go.” Laird asks how old she is. “I’m not going to tell you,” she says, scurrying behind the door of her well-built stone house.
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