by Wade Davis
The man was a pilgrim eleven months out of Lhasa, moving 650 miles toward Kathmandu, one body length at a time in ritual prostration. From a standing position, he would look ahead, lift his hands touched in prayer over his shoulders as high as he could reach, and then, bringing them back to his forehead, throat, and chest, he would bend forward to the ground. Touching the earth on all fours, with hands flat and squarely on his knees, he placed his forehead on the ground, making five points of contact. Thus he would purify from his being the five poisons of hatred, desire, ignorance, pride, and jealousy, that they might be replaced with the five corresponding aspects of wisdom. Standing once more, he drew his hands again in prayer to his chest, a symbolic gesture indicating his willingness as an aspiring bodhisattva to take on the suffering of all sentient beings. With each silent prostration he moved that much closer to his goal, which was not a place but a state of mind, not a destination but a path of salvation and liberation that is the ultimate quest of the pilgrim.
For Howard-Bury, less than three years removed from the blood and horror of Flanders, it was a stunning affirmation of religious purpose. He moved slowly past the man and listened. As his pony clip-clopped along the track, he could hear over his shoulder the rustle of woolen cloth and the sound of hands passing over the dirt. To the south all of the peaks came clear and the snows of Everest could be seen looming against a lapis sky. The expedition reached Tingri just after noon on June 19, exactly one month and 362 miles after leaving Darjeeling.
CHAPTER 7
The Blindness of Birds
IN THE EIGHTH century the Tibetan armies of King Trisong Detsän sacked the Chinese capital, crushing the Tang dynasty before turning west to threaten the Arab caliph and the lands of the Middle East. Then, at the height of his power, with Tibet in control of much of central Asia, the king decided to free his countrymen from their violence and barbarism. He called on a great Indian sage, Padma Sambhava, to introduce the Buddhist dharma, the teachings that might tame the demonic heart of the nation, silence the jealous mountain gods, and bring peace, wisdom, and transcendence to the people.
Uncertain where and how to begin, Padma Sambhava sought help from the Buddha himself, who had long since passed into the realm of nirvana. Buddha Shakyamuni, returning in resplendent form, picked up a stone from the ground, a sphere as light as a dove, spun it between his fingers, and then threw it high across the Himalaya. When it landed, a single perfect note resounded through the universe. The Buddha called the place T’ing Ri, and dispatched Padma Sambhava to find the stone and begin his teachings.
Padma Sambhava went first to the mountains north of the Phung Chu, the river the British under Howard-Bury had followed on their march from Shegar. There, in a place of power and pilgrimage known today as Tsibri, Padmasambhava met a dakini, a sky dancer, a female protector and mountain goddess who led him back across the valley to the hills of Langkor, where he actually found the sacred stone cast by the Buddha.
For the rest of his life, until finally ascending to the Copper Mountain Paradise, Padma Sambhava remained in the T’ing Ri Valley, meditating and teaching, inspiring the construction of monasteries, infusing the very land with the essence of the dharma, which the Buddha had distilled in the Four Noble Truths. First, all life is suffering. By this the Buddha did not mean that all life is negation, but only that terrible things happen. Evil was not exceptional but part of the existing order of things, a consequence of human actions, or karma. Second, the cause of suffering is ignorance. By ignorance the Buddha did not mean stupidity. He meant the tendency of human beings to cling to the cruel illusion of their own permanence and centrality, their isolation and separation from the stream of universal existence. The third of the noble truths was the revelation that ignorance could be overcome, and the fourth and most essential was the delineation of a contemplative practice that, if followed, promised an end to suffering and a true liberation and transformation of the human heart. The goal was not to escape the world but to escape being enslaved by it. The purpose of practice was not the elimination of self but the annihilation of ignorance and the unmasking of the true Buddha nature, which, like a buried jewel, shines bright within every human being, waiting to be revealed. Padma Sambhava’s transmission, in short, offered nothing less than a road map to enlightenment.
Revered as Guru Rinpoche, Teacher of Teachers, Padma Sambhava, “Lotus Born,” was in time deified by the Tibetan people. His wanderings were as prayers, his very presence a sign of the sacred, imprinted on the landscape for all time. The wonder of his memory and the miracles of his deeds drew an endless stream of pilgrims and mystic saints to T’ing Ri and beyond, to the wild reaches of the mountain streams that drained the glaciers and ice fields of the highest and most rugged knot of mountains in the world. He was the hero of heroes, a true bodhisattva, the wisdom hero, the realized being who had found enlightenment and yet remained in the earthly realm of samsara, of suffering and ignorance, to help all sentient beings achieve their own liberation.
To guide the people in their quest, and to ensure the eternal resonance of the wisdom doctrine, Guru Rinpoche planted along his path spiritual treasures, sacred texts and tantric teachings that might survive times of persecution, remaining magically hidden in the landscape until ready to be unveiled. Some were actual manuscripts sealed away in chortens or cached in caves. Others were instructions passed down in mystic script and concealed within the five elements, earth, water, fire, air, and ether. Some were sequestered in meditative space alone. To facilitate the endless flowering of the dharma, Guru Rinpoche through prophecy reached into the future, empowering a tradition of treasure seekers, tertöns, spiritual adepts destined to discover over time these dharma treasures, advanced and esoteric techniques that, like flashes of the spirit, allowed the seeker to bypass the mundane liturgies, yogas, and visualizations of orthodox practice and cut through to the very essence of Buddhahood.
In addition to these treasures, deposited as a ring of bone along the body of the Himalaya, Guru Rinpoche scattered throughout the mountains sacred valleys, or beyuls, hidden lands of fertility and blessings, secret places where simply to be born and to live was to be liberated from the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth. These hidden valleys, like the mythical kingdom of Shambhala, said to be found in the north of Tibet beyond the limitless horizons of the Chang Tang steppe, inspired the Western notion of Shangri-La. But for Tibetans, the Himalayan beyuls were actual places, landscapes that existed simultaneously in both physical and metaphysical space. They were true geographical refugia, verdant valleys dominated by protective mountain deities where people could seek solace as lonely pilgrims, or flee violence as a community in time of war.
Beyond the material plane, the beyuls also existed in mystic dimensions visible and accessible only to the most advanced practitioners of the Buddhist way. Ancient texts known as lamyig (neyig), guidebooks said to have been written by Guru Rinpoche himself in the eighth century, described their locations and landscapes, noted the ritual activities to be performed before crossing their thresholds, and identified the days and months of the year when a journey through the portals of the divine might prove to be auspicious. These conditions were delineated with great specificity, as were the consequences of violating the sanctity of the hidden lands. Those who entered the sacred space did so with both care and intense anticipation. Merely to walk through a landscape sanctified by Guru Rinpoche was to gain merit and obtain realization and great power, provided one’s intentions were pure and the timing propitious. To enter a beyul without preparation, or before it had been spiritually opened by an enlightened being, was to risk catastrophe. Guru Rinpoche left a clear warning to guide pilgrims on the perilous path:
“You blessed ones who will discover my treasures in the future, keep this testament in your minds. If you cannot sustain the teaching, misadventure will certainly befall you … If you reveal the secret teaching before it is time, you will be struck. Make your vision as high as the sky … your acti
vity heroic and confident … If you act according to my advice, blessings will spontaneously accrue. You will find Buddha within yourself … Failing to do as I advise, you will disgrace the Buddha … and, setting yourself on the road to hell, you will waste your precious human body.”
HOWARD-BURY HAD no idea that the mystic tracks of pilgrims radiated in every direction and dimension from the town of Tingri. It seemed to him on arrival to be a modest place, a warren of stone, and very much of this world. He noticed the absence of wood. The smoke of dung fires hovered in the early afternoon light. The street stalls and shop fronts were stacked with wool and salt, piles of red chilies and great mounds of white butter, barley flour, and chips of dried meat. His soldier’s eye took in its strategic position: two hundred houses packed closely along the flank of a high, solitary hill, remarkable in its isolation, that rose some 300 feet above the valley floor, a wide and windswept plain beyond which mountains towered on three sides. The local people, he was told, the nomads in particular, knew the town as Gang-gar, or “high encampment.”
Located at the crossroads of ancient routes that led east to Shegar and Lhasa, west in sixty miles to Nyenyam and beyond to Kathmandu, and south directly across the Himalaya to the Sherpa homeland of Solu Khumbu, Tingri had long anchored the border trade with Nepal. Like most frontier outposts, it was no stranger to vice. A way station of gambling, drinking, and brawling, it was a sleepless settlement of dark, smoky inns where brigands and thieves mingled with artisans and monks, and runaway debtors hid out among scores of harmless serfs fleeing the monastic estates. For the British climbers, who would make it their base for nearly a month as they probed the approaches to Everest, it was, Wollaston later wrote, a place of “unimaginable filth inhabited by people vile in their habits.” English sensibilities were readily inflamed, but even within Tibet, Tingri had a certain reputation. The town had one of the highest rates of illegitimate birth in all of the country, and also the lowest birth rate, for so many of its residents were sterile due to the high prevalence of venereal disease.
On top of Tingri Hill was an old Chinese fort, falling into ruin but only recently abandoned. Howard-Bury found the ground still littered with papers and books with Mandarin script, the inner walls adorned with bright frescoes, winged dragons and warriors riding stags into battle. When Hari Ram, the explorer and Indian pundit, had gone through Tingri in 1885, the garrison had numbered close to six hundred, Chinese and Tibetan troops positioned to defend the country against Gurkha invaders from Nepal. By 1921 this had been reduced to a shadow force of just four soldiers, plus a sergeant and depon, or military governor, whose main task was the transfer, each year, of 5,000 rupees as tribute to the Nepalese, a people the Tibetans still feared, even as they loathed the Chinese, expelled at last only a decade before.
At the base of the hill was a large rest house, built by the Chinese, and used to accommodate visiting government officials and dignitaries. Few Tibetans, however, were prepared to stay in the complex, haunted as it was by the ghosts of the many Chinese who had been killed within its walls. For the British it made for ideal lodgings. The rooms were small with mud floors; the roofs, as they discovered the first night, were in desperate need of repair; but the buildings, quaint and picturesque, with fantastic murals of flying dogs and demons, were fundamentally sound. There were three concentric courtyards, allowing Howard-Bury to billet the entire expedition: the porters in the outer ring; the survey parties, Morshead, Wheeler, and Heron in the middle; and the core expedition members in the inner sanctum. Water initially presented a problem, as the local supply was brown with mud. But a clear spring was soon found, not half a mile away. Once they had sorted through the supplies and equipment, determining what, if anything, had been lost or damaged on the journey from Darjeeling, the first priority was the construction of a darkroom, for they had to process film and make prints in the field, in a space free of dust and sheltered from the wind. Within hours of arrival they had plastered the floor, ceiling, and walls of a small chamber with mud, and by the end of the day, the first wet prints hung from a line of cord strung between posts carved in the shape of dragons.
The following morning, June 20, Howard-Bury and the entire party, save Mallory and Bullock, who had yet to arrive in Tingri, clambered up the hill, reaching the summit just after 6:00 a.m. with the hope of obtaining a view of the mountains to the south. Clouds, unfortunately, obscured much of the horizon, though Everest could be plainly seen and, to the west, some twenty or thirty miles away, the great summit of Cho Oyu, rising to 26,906 feet. It was a daunting sight, one that only reinforced their sense of the unknown. Their first task, as Mallory would later reflect, was to find a way to the mountain, and in the face of a dark and gathering monsoon. Each of Everest’s lateral valleys, radiating to all sides, would have to be penetrated and explored. These, no doubt, would be separated one from the other by formidable ridges, across which routes would need to be charted, passes identified and traversed. Once they were at close quarters, the real work would begin. Every face and ridge would need to be studied, the approaches to every saddle, or col, scrutinized. The very form and structure of the mountain—the character of its sedimentary rocks, the nature of its ice and snow—held mysteries waiting to be unveiled. “We must distinguish,” Mallory wrote, “the vulnerable places in its armour and finally pit our skill against the obstacles wherever an opportunity of ascent should appear until all such opportunities were exhausted.”
The British knew something of the basic geography. From Kampa Dzong, where Kellas had been buried, they had marched west to the confluence of the Phung Chu and the Arun, and then, following the Phung Chu upstream, had proceeded northwest to Shegar and then west again to reach Tingri. At Tingri the Phung Chu takes a dramatic turn to the north. Its headwaters, uncharted and unexplored, lay somewhere along the mountainous heights that formed the divide between the drainage of the Arun and that of the Tsangpo, Tibet’s greatest river, which flows across the plateau west to east before plunging through the Himalaya to become, as Morshead with Bailey had confirmed on their 1913 expedition, the mighty Brahmaputra.
Joining the Phung Chu at Tingri and flowing directly from the south was another river, which the Tibetans identified as the Ra Chu. By following this modest tributary upstream and due south, Howard-Bury understood, they would reach in a day, or perhaps two, a vast ice field descending from the flank of Cho Oyu, the Kyetrak Glacier, at the head of which rose the 19,050-foot Nangpa La, a treacherous pass open only half the year that led to Solu Khumbu and the southern side of the Himalaya in Nepal. East of the Nangpa La and beyond Cho Oyu, in a tangle of ice and rock the scale of the sky, stood the other great summits of the Everest massif: Gyachung Kang, Lhotse, Everest itself, Chomo Lonzo, and Makalu, as well as several lesser peaks, Pumori, Lingtren, Changtse, and Pethangtse. These mountains, piled one upon the other, stretched from the Nangpa La for forty miles before collapsing just beyond Makalu in the great gorge of the Arun, which delineated Everest from the east.
Clearly, the traditional trade route up the Ra Chu to the Nangpa La offered an opening to Everest from the west. To learn more, Howard-Bury paid a call on the acting governor, whom he found that afternoon at home, in a quarter of town favored by wealthy merchants, surrounded by his family. He was a cheerful man, surprisingly young, and dressed in elegant embroidered robes. An earring of pearls and turquoise dangled six inches from his left ear. His wife and mother-in-law wore their hair up in great halos of string pearls and coral. Long chains of turquoise and coral beads and lumps of amber hung from their necks, along with small golden amulets, boxes of prayers, inlaid with precious stones. They were exceedingly shy, having never seen a European, and in their nervousness their fingers ran stiffly over the beads of their rosaries. Howard-Bury’s offer to photograph the family provoked tears and protestations that took the husband some effort to quell.
The depon was not from Tingri, and his knowledge of the country to the south was inspired as much by rumor as by geogra
phy. Like all Tibetans, he measured distance not in miles but in increments of time. He spoke less of places than of personalities and events, the great yogis and their mythic deeds that had brought the landscape alive. All this left Howard-Bury rather baffled, though he did distill from the conversation some important information. The trade route up the Ra Chu to the Nangpa La in summer months had modest traffic, though it remained dangerous at all times of the year. In spring and fall it was impassable, in winter suicidal. But from the Ra Chu Valley itself other tracks provided access west and south across a pass known as the Phuse La to the drainage of the Rongshar Chu and to Lapche, a valley made sacred by Milarepa, the beloved bodhisattva who had lived and died there, and beyond to the Nepalese border town of Nyenyam. Howard-Bury recognized the name Milarepa, for it had been Tibetan reverence for this legendary mystic saint and poet that had led Charles Bell initially to oppose any suggestion of an Everest reconnaissance.
There was a second route, the depon continued; this one ran east from the Ra Chu Valley, crossing a high pass, the Lamna La, to reach the Dzakar Chu, another tributary of the Arun, which flowed east and northeast, parallel to the Phung Chu and about fifteen miles to the south of it. The Dzakar Chu was itself formed by two smaller streams, one of which, the Rong Chu, was said to be born in the very glaciers that enveloped the northern base of Everest. Located at the edge of the ice was a monastery, and in caves farther up the flanks of the valley lived hermits, pilgrims who had settled into a lifetime of retreat, isolation, and prayer. At night, it was said, they danced alone, untouched by the wind and cold, chanting to the rhythms of two-headed drums while playing trumpets carved from human thighbones, all the time invoking the spirits and deities of the universe. By following the track that led to Rongbuk, the highest of all monasteries in Tibet, the British would reach, the depon cautioned, the very heart of the mountain.