Ted Conover

by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today

  “Did they hunt it?” I asked.

  “Actually,” said Dorjey, “they found the beast in the toilet.”

  He explained. Like most traditional Zanskari dwellings, the house was made of mud bricks, and the ground level was devoted mainly to sheltering animals in cold weather; a small separate section of it was reserved for the household latrine. The mother had gone to squat in one of the holes in the second floor that opened onto the latrine space, when she heard a growl and peered down on the frozen stalagmite of feces below: a snow leopard showed her its fangs. Stalking the farm animals, the leopard had gotten trapped. The family promptly did what any local family would have done in such a circumstance: they stoned it to death.

  Dorjey understood the irony. He was an interesting mix of older generation and younger, and a delightful guy to have around. Forty-something, he tended toward Western dress, but he was very religious; some part of him, I’m sure, would have been happy to have been a monk. He was married and had six children. This did not prevent him from taking a little time off to assist people like me and Seb, or to make a pilgrimage to a religious center such as Dharamsala, where he had followed a lama’s instruction to perform ten thousand prostrations as a step to enlightenment. But religious practice had not narrowed his mind. The day I met him, he was seated on the floor of the living room in his traditional earthen house in Padum, eating lunch in the company of two maroon-clad monks; the group was watching a fuzzy Indian television broadcast about an impending eclipse of the sun. Attached to the plaster wall of his son’s bedroom, I noticed, was the same magazine photo of pop singer Avril Lavigne that my daughter had on her bedroom wall in New York. Dorjey prayed and chanted several times a day, but he also loved to discuss the characters in the Harry Potter books (which English-speaking friends would send him), and some of the vocabulary he’d picked up there—gruesome, he liked to say, and goblet. His favorite character was Hagrid, though Dorjey himself resembled no Westerner more than the jolly comedian Buddy Hackett. He laughed at the sight of me imagining a snow leopard, so elusive to Matthiessen on his spiritual journey into Nepal’s Dolpo region, a symbol of rarity and the beauty we can’t see, meeting its end in a frozen latrine.

  We stopped for mint tea on a graveled section of riverbank, in the sun. I chatted with two of the boys, Lobzang Teshi and Tenzin Namdol, who said they weren’t tired at all. Tenzin, I noticed, was carrying a second rucksack; he admitted that it belonged to a girl in the group. The sky was blue, but you had to look way up to see it. And for the first time in quite a while, no part of me was cold. High, high up on the canyon wall across the river, someone spotted an ibex; its distance from us, and the immense scale of the rock walls, made me feel small.

  The chaddar changes constantly. Here a porter negotiates a narrow ice ledge, all that remains of the path on one side of the gorge.

  Some Zanskaris came shuffling into view, walking the chaddar in the opposite direction. It was two groups, actually, and they stopped to chat with us and compare notes on the terrain ahead. Three of the walkers, it turned out, were mailmen, carrying bags of letters from the big post office in Leh to the tiny one in Padum—in a good year, they said, there might be three mail runs on the chaddar. After that, Zanskaris had to wait until the spring thaw for mail service.

  With the weather a bit warmer, we started seeing more and more open water. I was intrigued by the little birds, white-throated dippers, that skipped and dashed alongside it: they could submerge in a patch of open water, disappear for several seconds, and pop up again a few yards down-stream, and some of them did it again and again, searching for food in the depths. Among our group, however, the more seasoned trekkers began to worry. Our path down the chaddar began to meander more as the open water increased, and patches of ice began to seem suspect. More than once, loud cracks and whumps—deep movements of frozen, fractured water that I’ve heard nowhere else in nature—brought the group up short as everyone silently wondered: Was something cataclysmic about to happen? Would the surface hold?

  Sometimes I imagined that our continued progress depended on faith, that we could walk without falling because we believed we could, a mass delusion. Sometimes I seemed to have better luck when I didn’t look too carefully at the next step. I’d heard ski instructors say, Don’t focus on your skis, and skating instructors say, Look straight ahead, and I imagined that some Zanskari chaddar sage had intoned that same advice. Certainly there was a lot to see. When the gorge opened up you could glimpse ragged peaks, sunny in the distance while it was shady on the ice. Once, when the surface of the ice was like a mirror, I saw such a peak while looking down. But it seemed like such bad luck, I looked away, straight ahead.

  There were landmarks our guides knew to watch for along the way. One was a giant juniper tree at a spot called Shukpa Chenmo: it had fallen over but lived on, and its trunk and some branches were festooned with prayer flags. (Due to the importance of juniper in ceremonies, the trees were respected and cared for.) Others were interesting stone formations. Thermally heated water spewed out of the canyon wall at one point, creating a ring of green around rocks that vaguely resembled a nose; this was Palda Tsomo, or Nose Spring. Another formation was known as the Clitoris. “We don’t tell that to the children,” Dorjey assured me.

  And there was one cave that, because of its history, nobody ever used, even in an emergency. A king of Zanskar, Gyalpo Gyazo, had stopped there with his entourage many generations before. But overnight the river rose, and they could not leave. Days later, out of food, the king ate a knapsack made of animal hide; and his men “plotted to slay the cook for food.” But the cook, said Dorjey, got wind of the plan. When night fell, he joined together several walking sticks and laid them out in the water. Floating fragments of ice attached to them, making a partial bridge. He added more wood, and the bridge grew large enough that he could escape. Soon the others did, too—probably hot on his trail.*

  As the day warmed, the ice became more and more questionable. Larger patches of open water appeared, and near the shores, where the ice seemed thinnest but the water was not deep, a couple of people broke through and got their shoes wet.

  Dorjey’s experience of the larger world, his many trips through the chaddar, and, probably, his status as our translator may have made him overconfident. As the leaders of the students slowed on the uncertain surface, Dorjey took the lead. For a while he followed the meandering game tracks across the thin layer of snow, on the theory that animals might possibly know something about the thickness of the ice below that we did not. But when the game trails disappeared, he marched boldly ahead anyway—and promptly fell through, up to his calf. Laughing, he pulled his leg out and forged ahead over the thin ice—and soon went through again, this time up to his thigh. Unluckily for him, the entire line of walkers had now stopped to watch. He tried to extract himself quickly, but no luck: leaning on the surrounding ice to pull himself up, he crashed through completely, this time soaking himself from the waist down. There was little danger—the day not terribly cold—but some embarrassment.

  Finally heading toward shore, he soldiered on a bit farther until he came to a flat spot where we could “take tea.” We made our way cautiously to the spot and then helped Dorjey collect firewood, pausing now and then to watch others negotiate the tricky stretch of ice. Two or three chivalrous young men, including Tenzin Namdol, took off their shoes and socks and ferried many of the young women over the bad spots by carrying them on their backs, so that they would not soak their sneakers. They could not have enjoyed walking barefoot over ice and snow, but there were no theatrics as the young men did it, no shows of discomfort or suffering. They, and their feet, were admirably tough. Dorjey, as the tea fire grew hot, removed his trousers, wrung them out, and placed walking sticks through the legs, which allowed him to spread them out for maximum exposure to the heat. “It seems the departure day was not auspicious for me!” he joked. As the fabric dried, we talked about other falls.

  Mushy snow tests the Zans
kari conviction that there is only one thing worse than going barefoot on snow: soaking wet shoes.

  They could be quite serious. A few years before, Seb had been walking on the chaddar with a group of English mountaineers who wanted to try climbing some of the frozen waterfalls; unlike the Zanskaris, they sometimes spread out as they walked, faster walkers moving ahead and some people walking alone. Seb was ahead of his friend, and couldn’t see him, when he thought he heard something. He stopped, waited a moment, and turning saw a head bobbing even with the ice. His friend had fallen through in the middle of the river and, laden with backpack and heavy clothing, had little chance of pulling himself out. When he saw him, what Seb really feared was that the man would be swept under the ice by the swift current: even if you were a strong swimmer, the chances of bobbing up downstream where there was a gap in the ice were extremely slim. With Seb’s help, though, he was soon extricated. The shivering fellow hurriedly stripped down—to the amusement of the porters—and put on a set of dry clothes. However, he declined to backtrack to the cooking fire they had recently left in a cave, because it would mean recrossing the river. So his friends watched him carefully, and he warmed up by walking. Seb’s policy ever since then was that chaddar walkers had to stay within each other’s sight at all times.

  Seb himself had taken one bad fall on this trip: his feet had simply slipped out from under him, landing him squarely on his tailbone. It hurt, but he could keep going. I myself had fallen several times, though never, yet, as badly: so far I’d been able to see it coming and put out a hand to cushion the blow. When falling, or the possibility of falling, left me particularly exhausted, I would stretch onto the soles of my boots a pair of rubbers with tiny metal studs—postal carriers and others in northern climes wear them—which provided dreamy traction. They also prevented me from shuffling along in the efficient Zanskari way and could slow me down. But where the ice was superslick and my nerves frazzled, they were a godsend.

  Others fell, too—in particular, Tsering Dorjey, the novice porter who was a plasterer by profession, and a bit clumsy. His goncha had rips and tears caused by various encounters with rocks and timber and ice, and holes from getting too close to fires. I knew he had a fondness for drink. Unlike the other porters, who were a bit shy around me, he would occasionally walk right up and say something: “Did you see that bird?” or “The water is moving very deep beneath the ice—can you see it through there?” I found Tsering interesting, but Dorjey seemed annoyed by him and didn’t like to translate what he was saying. One morning Tsering came up and happily tickled the whiskers under my chin, leaving me perplexed.

  One day he tied our little kerosene stove to the top of his pack. When he bent over without thinking, the heavy metal stove bonked him on the head, resulting in a cut. A fall on the chaddar caused him the greatest distress; I didn’t see it happen but I asked about it after he turned up at lunch with a bloody gash on the side of his nose. All the other porters were chortling as he explained it to me through Dorjey, who could barely contain his mirth.

  “He says,” Dorjey began, hardly able to speak, “he says the ice shifted and made him slip. As you can see, he fell through. He also has cut his leg.”

  Tsering, miserable, showed me the superficial gash on his shin, and then made a further, more vehement statement to Dorjey.

  “He says,” Dorjey began again, this time pausing to wipe away tears of laughter, “he says … he says … that when he went in the water—” Peals of laughter resounded from the other men, some of whom spoke some English and wanted to hear Dorjey say it. “He says,” Dorjey began again, this time determined to finish, “that when he fell in, he saw… he saw … th-the Dark Lord!” At this, Dorjey exploded in laughter, and the others doubled over with mirth. It was hard not to laugh along with them, but I tried my best, since Tsering was looking mournfully at me, perhaps waiting to see if one person here would offer some sympathy.

  “The Dark Lord,” I repeated to Seb. “Does he mean, as in Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter? He-who-must-not-be-named?”

  “I don’t think so …,” Seb began.

  “It is sort of like that,” Dorjey said, regaining his composure, “but different. Really, it’s the Lord of Darkness. Our version, you might say.” He left it at that.

  In any event, these mishaps were all part of traversing the chaddar. It would be a mistake to think of the river as moving and the chaddar as still; the chaddar did move and shift, sometimes dramatically, as when its surface gave way to a footstep. Other times it shifted slowly. Across the ice were always pressure fractures, looking like scars. Occasionally the pressures seemed to push on a single point near the chaddar’s middle, resulting in a gently raised cone with fractures all around it, like a low volcano. In some places you could see where pieces of ice had cracked and tipped or fallen into the water below; sometimes, afterward, fresh water would rush up and over the opening, creating a new, uneven surface as it froze on top of the existing ice. Seb said that sometimes this was caused by dropping temperatures: deep cold could thicken the ice and decrease the space available underneath for running water, forcing it onto the surface. Conversely, snow could function as an insulating blanket, warming the ice and encouraging breakup. Day and night we would hear groans, creaks, and harsh reports that made me want to tiptoe: the ice was just the frozen skin of a hibernating giant below.

  ———

  As we continued it got warmer and warmer—a function of the weather, not of the change in our location—and the ice became even less predictable. I was following in the footsteps of Stanzin Zoma on the afternoon of the second day when the line of walkers slowed, then stopped. At first I felt relief. It was a chance to take off my jacket, which was too heavy for the strenuous pace and warming weather; I was wet with perspiration. But then relief turned to alarm because ahead, in place of silent ice, I saw there was open water, the dark, rushing river risen back to the surface. The only remaining ice was clinging to the edges of sheer rock walls. Everyone waited as Lobzang Tsetan, the one-eyed porter who was in the lead, tested the narrow remaining stretch of ice by tapping gingerly with his stick and then with his lead foot. He retreated to an area of loose rocks a few yards back, got two handfuls of dirt, and returned to the ledge to toss it onto the ice in front of him to give it some friction and reduce the chances of falling into the dark deep water that rushed alongside. From there he turned toward the wall and hugged it, shimmying along until he was past—and the danger confronted the next person.

  The next morning, our third, was brilliantly sunny and warm, and briefly the ice disappeared altogether. But here the river was wide, slow and shallower. For twenty or thirty feet, everyone had to wade. Apart from those few girls lucky enough to be carried, everyone took off their shoes and socks. The water was very, very cold. Downstream from this spot, as feet were dried and laces tied, a group approached from the other direction: tourists. They were French, men and women, and they had good equipment, including neoprene divers’ booties for situations such as the one that lay just ahead of them. And they had a small army of porters, many of whom paused to chat with people in our group.

  While most of the traffic we had passed on the chaddar was Zanskari, Seb said that tourism, mainly European, was growing every year. Virtually all of it was centered on Leh, which not only was picturesque but was thoroughly imbued with the Tibetan Buddhist culture that so interested many in the West. Those who moved further on, to places such as Zanskar, tended to have trekking or mountaineering ambitions, as tourist infrastructure (hotels, restaurants) outside Leh was fairly nonexistent. It was good employment for Zanskaris, but the journeying was unpredictable.

  The chaddar did not always behave in a way that meshed well with Western schedules. On the afternoon of our third day—another warm one—we passed a group of Englishmen who were being led up the chaddar into Zanskar by Sonam “Jimmy” Stopgais, a friend of Seb’s at whose house I’d eaten a dinner of momos (meat dumplings) the summer before. Jimmy, normal
ly sunny himself, looked troubled: in the day since our group passed through, the watery area upstream had grown; the chaddar there was now impassable. His clients—mainly businessmen who had taken a week off from work and family—looked restive. They had reason to be concerned: two weeks later Seb and I would read in the Indian press that the chaddar had broken up especially early that year, stranding nearly fifty foreign tourists whom the army had had to evacuate in helicopters. Jimmy and his group were almost certainly among them. We were among the last to get through.

  As we passed these tourist groups, I got the chance to see myself, as it were, from the outside. Seb and I had been exclusively among Zanskaris for many days—indeed, Seb had immersed himself in Zanskar for weeks at a time, many years in a row—but clearly we belonged to this other tribe of brightly jacketed, impressively assisted, high-tech-equipped Westerners. Back when James Crowden had been the first Westerner on the chaddar, in 1977, the sight of people like us would probably have brought most Zanskaris up short. Zanskar had never been completely isolated, however: traders on the various silk routes of central Asia had passed through Leh for centuries. Zanskaris had traded directly with nomads such as the Chang-pa of Tibet, with whom they exchanged grain for salt and wool, and Gaddi shepherds from their immediate north and south, from whom they got wool. And yet, the arrival of Western culture, in the form of people like us and various academic researchers and development workers, but even more potently, I imagine, as conveyed by television, movies, and magazines, was a visitation of an entirely different order of magnitude. Silk route traders may have arrived with wonders, but it is doubtful they ever inspired a generation to abandon its ways of dressing, of trading, of religiosity (for who could worship Buddha the same way outside a land where doing so was such a part of daily life?). Those earlier trades didn’t move the Zanskaris to leave home and learn things you could only learn from the outside world—among them, medicine and the technology for building roads. Western culture, personified on this trip by brightly dressed tourist trekkers, was unspeakably powerful.