If a crow could hunt, what need would there be for keeping a falcon?
Garwhal proverb
It was an ordinary police station. An office, some old ledgers on a shelf. The young man sent to interrogate him did not know him, even got his name wrong. But the charge sheet was long, the file, in a brown cardboard flimsy was full. The young man, prematurely and aggressively bald, was able to leaf through it like an art expert leafing through a delightful portfolio of watercolours.
‘So, you started a Buddhist temple in Leningrad? In 1916. This was presumably a front for Japanese Buddhist spies.’
Agvan, the Buryat Lama, was eighty-four years old. He was aware of what would happen. He was exhausted too. All those compromises. All the things he had turned a blind eye to. He had hung on to his dream of power for so long. It was burned deep into him. Then one day he knew he would die soon and he hurried home, back to the Buryat people of his youth in Siberia. His whole mind was on leaving this world, but still he lived!
In the long summer of 1937 the dappled green of poplars and larches was overwhelming. He felt the inexorable wonder and completeness of the world he was meant to leave. Of course he would be reborn, but long years rubbing shoulders with frank and brutal materialists, like the young man in front of him, manufacturing blunt awkward lies, had sharpened doubts; not doubting the reality of reincarnation, but the details. Sometimes there was complete slippage. He got depressed for a second or two and imagined himself finished and buried under the earth floor of a police yard. As he’d come in, he had seen the turned and stamped clay along the wall, shot and buried, move on.
Agvan Dorjiev, the monk who played politics
He had seen so much, he had met two Czars, taught the Dalai Lama. He had been the cause of the Younghusband invasion of Tibet, had dealings with Lenin and Stalin. What had it amounted to? Mere shaking of the curtain’s edge. He’d long since realised that the attempt to use Bolshevism was futile. It used you. You cannot be a parasite on something that is determined to consume you. The grip always slips.
‘You made contact with the Japanese spy Kawaguchi in Lhasa. Through him, you supplied information that resulted in the destruction of the Russian fleet.’
On the unending train journey from Leningrad to Siberia he had worked through day by day a familiar trope: how he had drawn the British into Tibet, how his friendship with the thirteenth Dalai Lama had worked both for and against him, resulting in stalemate. He had resented that for years, but now he saw that this had kept Tibet free of the red scourge. There were no real Russians left, only members of Stalin’s cult.
He was an old man. He could hardly see well enough to read. After each day’s interrogation, he had to sign papers. He did it all willingly enough. Never oppose, always turn, let the wind whip by, just as it whips by the fragile windhorse flags of a monastery.
One thing he had done right. Once he’d realised he was a pawn used by Moscow to destroy the unity of Buddhists in the Soviet Union – the very opposite of his entire life’s work — he’d set about sabotaging their efforts. In formal letters sent with red agents to Tibet, whose purpose was to establish a Soviet Trojan horse in the country, Agvan extolled the virtues of his communist bosses. But he had not lost his Buryat cunning. He sent secret handwritten missives using the Lhasa dialect to the Dalai Lama. These were carried by a trusted merchant travelling from Mongolia to Tibet. He’d written:
I am an old man and will die very soon. Mongolia is not a peaceful country as it was formerly. The government is deadly against religions and monks, and they are helpless. Please don’t have anything to do with the mission. I had to write a letter at their dictation to Your Holiness for these Bolshevik agents to take with them, but please do not take any notice of that letter.
The Dalai Lama allowed the covert Bolshevik mission to wander wherever they wished – but they were spied on wherever they went. No permission was given for a permanent embassy — not even Britain was allowed one, it was pointed out. The Dalai Lama expressed his friendship in vague terms, but the price of an audience (the face-to-face meeting kept being postponed) was that they should leave the next day. So they did, empty-handed.
The foolish young man and his masters knew nothing of this letter. Instead, they insisted on constructing a false case against him. Through the high window he could see nothing except the light blue sky, with that peculiar luminescence it has in Siberia; it had been a longing to see that light for the last time that had drawn him back.
‘Is it not true that the reason for your current residence in Siberia is to organise counter-revolution and oppose the closing of Buddhist monasteries here? Monasteries that will be used in the Japanese invasion of the Soviet Union as counter-revolutionary bases?’
He was uncomfortable, but he was not restrained in any way. He found hard chairs uncomfortable and he preferred to kneel any day: at eighty-four, his thighs were so thin that kneeling presented no difficulty. His friends had told him the first interview was always easy – if you confessed, they shot you straight away. If you held out, they would interview you again, this time with torture. If that failed, then the third interrogation would begin with threats to one’s family and friends. No one could resist that.
‘Is it not true that in 1929 you buried nine hundred thousand steel needles in the Trans-Baikal to try and stir up fascist folk religion against the Communist Party?’
He answered for the record: ‘Yes, it is true that I helped establish a new prayer site for the Kalachakra tantra, that is, the wheel of time meditation.’
‘And you admit the charge of dabbling in folk religion and primitive witchcraft?’
‘No.’
‘I read here that the nine hundred thousand needles will become the “spirits of future warriors who will create the kingdom of Shambhala – a Buddhist kingdom”. These are your words, are they not?’
‘At the time, Comrade Stalin himself agreed to the formation of the Baikal prayer site.’
The young man shouted, ‘That is a lie!’
Agvan allowed himself the luxury of smiling; he knew he would have no such luxury when they came for him again. He would not utter lies, though.
If he straightened his stiffening back it looked as though he was paying more attention, giving more respect. He could, by stretching his spine upwards, gain a glimpse of a velvety pink branch, just about to bud into bloom. It moved in the wind outside. It would be hot soon, everyone was surprised at how hot Siberia could get on a cloudless summer day.
‘Is it not true that in the summer of 1923 you used the dormitory of the Buddhist centre in Leningrad as a meeting place for fellow spies, such as Barchenko?’
‘I met Barchenko several times. He was a man seeking the miraculous. He did not realise it is everywhere. Neither did I, until recently. I thought it needed its own country to thrive. But all it needs is a slight turning away. Even in Soviet Russia the miraculous cannot be extinguished.’
The young man smiled. ‘Quite right. The Soviet Union is a place of miracles – economic miracles.’
Agvan also smiled. He knew that this deluded soul had some part of him that was not bad, and might yet be good.
‘Will you shoot me then?’ he asked.
The young man did not look up from his papers. He said, ‘The revolutionary court decides all matters. Besides, it is well known, there is no death penalty in the Soviet Union. Now, is it not true that you vouched for Barchenko and in return he received one hundred thousand roubles to establish spy networks for Japan?’
‘That money was all used in his travels around the Soviet Union and in his attempts to discover secret sources of knowledge.’
‘Do you admit to trying to organise with him a counter-revolutionary movement, first in Mongolia and Tibet, and then in the Soviet Union . . .’
The questioning went on for three days. He was fed borscht with small unidentifiable pieces of meat. The famines had been felt here too. He was offered vodka. In the past, he had drunk deeply with Bo
lsheviks of every stripe. They had been like brothers in the early days of the revolution. But one by one they had turned away, saying, ‘My loyalty is always to communism, my loyalty is always to the leadership, that must always precede whatever friendship we may have had.’ It had been hard to believe, that men who had saved his life at risk to their own would eventually turn against him, with reluctance, but they would turn.
Ah, it wasn’t like that under the Czar. He had been sixty when the revolution happened. But the nomadic Buryats were hardy people. The oracle in Tibet had predicted he would live two lives in one lifetime. After the revolution, he had indeed lived another life. He had put his dealings with the Czar behind him and embraced the Red instead. It was purer and much closer to the truth, he felt – at first. All men were brothers it seemed in those days. With the Czar there had been so much corruption – but he now saw that it was nothing compared to the total corruption of minds that Stalin had helped bring about. He thought back to the Buddhist temple the Czar had allowed to be built, had given the land for free and encouraged donations. That was a great moment – the raising of the Kalachakra Temple in 1916. No one had any clue what would happen the following year. At least the Czar had been a human being, for all the faults of the court.
There was no doubt in his mind now that all revolutions were against the ‘wheel of time’, the Kalachakra itself. All things came in their own time; when man forced the pace of events he brought nothing but calamity upon himself and others. Men were not meant to ‘change the world’, he saw that clearly now; they were meant to accept it, obey its strictures and be joyful in heart.
There was light at the centre of everything, said the inner teaching of the Kalachakra. That light was pure joy. The emotions clouded it, veiled it. The intellect clouded and veiled it, sometimes darkened it completely. The body, in pain or pleasure, could veil it, but beyond all – and this was all you could say in words – was a shining element of joy, shimmering, burgeoning like sunrise. Why had it taken so long to understand this simple thing?
The interview ended suddenly. He felt a little ill and said so. ‘All right, we postpone for today,’ said the young man, slapping the file shut so that the breeze could be felt.
But he did feel ill. It was not an excuse. He could not lie on the hard plank bunk in the police prison cell. He knelt on the floor. Then he bent forward to relieve the searing pain. It was really strange that the pain suddenly ebbed away. He heard his uncle’s voice, which he had not heard for sixty years.
In the morning, Agvan Dorjiev was found dead of a heart attack in his cell. His body was removed to the police mortuary, where it was photographed, then kept waiting outside, owing to the pressure of bodies there to be admitted.
5
Tilman Goes East
In my homeland I possess one hundred horses, but if I go, I go on foot.
Bhutanese proverb
Shipton and Tilman were the kings of interwar Himalayan climbing. Forget Mallory and Irvine and the sad shenanigans on Everest, Shipton and Tilman were the kings . . .
‘My choice fell upon the Assam Himalaya as being the most accessible and the least known region for exploration.’ So wrote Major Harold ‘Bill’ Tilman, who no one seems to have called Bill; his sister called him Willy, his fellow soldiers Tilly, and to most other people, including his longtime climbing partner Eric Shipton, he was plain Tilman. When after ten or more years of climbing together Shipton suggested they might call each other by their first names, Tilman thought about it for a minute and then protested, ‘It sounds so damn silly!’
Tilman wanted to climb Namche Barwa, which bookends the main stretch of the Himalayas in the East. It’s a high (7,782 metres) and dangerous mountain, which, like Nanga Parbat, its western counterpart at the other end, resisted climbing for many years; in fact, it was the world’s highest unclimbed peak when it finally succumbed in 1992. But Namche Barwa is firmly in Tibet and was out of bounds to Tilman in 1939. He focused instead on the peaks within British Indian borders: Kangto (7,090), Gori Chen (6,538) and Nyegyi Kansang (7,047) – all unclimbed guardians of that river which bursts through the immense barrier of the Himalayas and turns from being the Tibetan Tsangpo into the Indian Brahmaputra. But Gori Chen, a low peak by Himalayan standards, would be no easy hike in the hills. Tough conditions always appealed to Tilman. And he loved exploring: ‘I also hoped to make a map; not in the cause of pure science, but with the utilitarian notion of its possible usefulness to myself in the future.’ His two fingers to science, received opinion, most forms of authority while also maintaining decorum, neatly cut hair and a dislike for bohemians is all part of his endearing Englishness – as was his love of dogs and mountain people – both of which he was able to get on with far better, it seemed, than his fellow Englanders. Tilman, who fought in both wars – in the second parachuting behind enemy lines at forty-three – was a shy, supremely tough eccentric, who, aged seventy-nine, disappeared on an expedition sailing between Chile and the Falkland Islands. Despite having a back injury that gave him pain, sustained in a climbing accident in the 1930s, he kept up his adventurous exploits to the very end of his life. Though he never married, he admitted, ‘I’ve had my peccadilloes’.
But visiting Arunachal Pradesh in the 1939 rainy season would test his toughness to the maximum.
The upper limit of hill cultivation is around 2,000 metres. Above that lies the temperate rainforest, which begins to peter out into rhododendrons and conifers around 3,000 metres. Altitude is not the only factor in determining what grows where. The surrounding vegetation has an effect. If the mountains do not exceed 2,500 metres – in Nagaland, for example – then there will be no temperate rainforest; everything is covered in what can be called hill jungle. Only in mountains that exceed 3,500 metres can we expect to see a band of temperate rainforest existing. The line where hill jungle meets rainforest is always shifting. In gorges that run deep and damp, the jungle manages to rise high and aggressive above the 2,500-metre line. But when there are very high mountains in the range it seems to provide the temperate rainforest with a confidence that extends its reach down into what would be usually thought of as jungle areas.
In April, Tilman started from Darjeeling. It was before the monsoon yet there were still mosquitoes and leeches to bother him as he moved up through the relentless jungle of the foothills of Arunachal Pradesh.
Temperate forests are characterised by sheer variety. While the jungle is all broad-leafed trees and the high forest belt all conifers, the temperate rainforest contains a mixture of both. It is not entirely evergreen or deciduous. In natural temperate rainforest, no two trees in contact are alike.
Tilman was not used to serious jungle travel. He had lived and worked in Kenya for fourteen years at an altitude of 2,000 metres – where the air is cool and pleasant year-round. He had crossed Africa by bicycle – though this had been on roads and tracks and not by hacking your way through slippery steaming vegetation dripping with leeches and, at night, swarmed by mosquitoes. It was also hot. Tilman wore shorts and his lightweight approach meant that mosquito nets had been left behind. He was hampered too by a strong prejudice against science – which, in this case, was right in assuming that malaria came from mosquito bites and not, as Tilman half-seriously suggested, from an ‘unscientific diet’. There was not enough quinine, though he did bring ample quantities of cocaine for use against snow blindness – but the snow was not to be encountered.
After they had climbed above 500 metres (the initial foothills had been only 200 metres above sea level) the party were beset by blister flies or ‘dimdams’ that bit incessantly, leaving behind a tiny irritating blood blister. And at night, mosquitoes feasted upon the men. Malaria soon began to show its ugly symptoms. Managing to cross some passes over 3,500 metres they still spent days resting up, too feverish to move. Tilman took his plane table and surveying equipment to 5,000 metres, but the effort cost him a week shivering and sweating in his sleeping bag. When he recovered, he found that the Sher
pas were faring just as badly, and in one case, worse. Nukku, who had been on Everest with Tilman, died of cerebral malaria. They buried him and built a cairn, as Sherpas do, over his grave. The expedition was over. The headman of the nearest mountain village helped them evacuate the area. Tilman rode on a dzo, the same beast that the Dalai Lama would escape over the Assam Himalayas upon some twenty years later. A beast of last resort.
Tilman wrote: ‘It is easy to be wise after the event. There are several precautions that might have been taken . . . mosquito nets, trousers instead of shorts, bamber oil [citronella-based insect repellent] and heavier prophylactic doses of quinine would all help reduce the risks.’
The master of lightweight, fast-moving, tough expeditioning had met his match. Perhaps Tilman had underestimated the place simply because it wasn’t as high as Nepal and the Karakoram. Sixty years later, top British climber Doug Scott would have a similar experience trying to climb the same mountain of Gori Chen. His eighteen days in the jungle resulted in malaria, a twisted knee and diphtheria, and no attempt at actual climbing on snow and ice had been possible.
Travelling later on would have made things easier – though colder once you got above the snow line. I visited Arunachal Pradesh in winter and found the forests leech-free, the rains abated. I spent a few days scrambling up through the jungle and it was tough going; stray off the main path and the smaller paths are little more than game trails that fizzle out. It is steep unrelenting country and the snow line is higher than in the western end of the Himalayas. In the end, I turned back before I had cleared the trees, but not before I had heard a tiger’s cough deep in the shaded interior.
6
Escape from Dehradun
The bullock disappeared while in the act of ploughing.
White Mountain Page 26