The Snow leopard

by Matthiessen, Peter

  On my return, Dawa, Phu-Tsering, and the two Ring-mos are squatting on their heels at the cave fire. Phu-Tsering says that we are to strike camp tomorrow. The brown faces stare at me through fire-smoke as I cheer and clap my hands like a small boy. But a note from GS, who has gone on to Shey with Jang-bu, dampens my outburst.

  1200 hrs. Top of Pass

  Peter:

  The route yesterday was obvious—sorry I was not there. Straight up the ridge you talked about and in two hours you're at the pass.

  Move all gear to Camp 2. Establish Camp 3 on pass. Two trips a day can easily be made.

  With your trusty knife cut some thin 2-3' long willow wands and mark the trail every few hundred feet, in case it drifts over.

  Pay porters 80R's each.

  GBS

  I go out among the river rocks with Dawa's inlaid bronze-and-silver kukri and slash crossly at the stunted sprigs of willow. Why does GS want to establish a "Camp 3" on a windy snow pass near 18,000 feet when we must keep returning anyway to "Camp 2" (I presume he means the snowfields depot), a much more sheltered site a thousand feet below? For twenty-five dollars' worth of porterage, I fume, we could have been across this pass with its wind, cold, and deep snow. True, my attitude is not improved by the note's peremptory tone, nor by its seeming suggestion that if GS had been there, the porters would have gone on to Shey yesterday afternoon.

  Then I relax; surely he does not mean this note the way I take it. What seems abrasive in GS's behavior is often merely abrupt, as when he flings something that he wishes me to look at through my tent flap; once I flung something right back out again, as a hint that I didn't care much for these manners. But as I learn more about this man, I see that such acts are not bad manners but the intense respect of a private soul for the privacy of others; for all he knew, I was taking notes, or meditating, and might not welcome an exchange of any kind. On a hard journey, with no respite from each other, such consideration (extended also to the sherpas) is far more valuable than mere "good manners," which sometimes hide a mean spirit beneath, and may evaporate when things get rough.

  In the lowlands, GS was a formal man who could not quite commimicate his feelings; in the freedom of the snow mountains he is opening out in true, warm colors. On two occasions, he has managed to say how glad he is of my company on this trip, and he astonished me the other day in Ring-mo when he spoke of an impulse to "cuddle" a child (the child being snot-nosed and filthy, the impulse was stifled). And so, for all his thorns, a gentleness shines through. The sherpas see it; they are fond of him and respect him very much. Phu-Tsering, hunkered on his heels, is often to be seen humming contentedly at "Chorch's" knee.

  I wax my boots, I wash my socks, I listen to Phu-Tsering hiun as he rolls out his chapatis on a small round piece of wood. With the sherpas, I have supper in the cave, huddled close to the small fire, which bends low in the night winds of the ravine, Phu-Tsering tells me that this past September, while he and four or five other villagers were digging potatoes at Khumbu, in eastern Nepal, a small yeti appeared, the size of a "big sheep," moving along a hillside more or less on all fours, as if foraging; when it fled, Phu-Tsering says, it rose on its hind legs and moved much faster. It had a distinct pointed head, and was "between black and red" in color. I thought of the unknown creature I had seen in the upper Suli Gad, which had looked darker than the reddish color usually attributed to the yeti: "between black and red" was about right, and well describes many primate creatures, which often have black hair in early life and tend toward reddish as they age. Perhaps Phu-Tsering is untruthful or deluded, or is concocting something that the sahib might wish to hear. It is also possible that what he says is true.

  Phu-Tsering's awestruck face, so like a child's, reminds me of GS's story of the time in eastern Nepal when our cook received a letter saying that his wife had left him for another man. Weeping, Phu-Tsering had got to his feet and read the letter aloud to all the Sherpa villagers where they were camped, and the people had all stood there and wept with him. As GS commented, "A Westerner would have slunk off and kicked stones; you have to admire the Sherpas for being so open about everything"—so open, so without defense, therefore so free, true Bodhisattvas, accepting like the variable airs the large and small events of every day.

  OCTOBER 29

  With a full pack, I leave at dawn, and make good time up to the sun, at 15,500 feet. The trek is fun, for knowing the way I can enjoy details. On bare places in the ice-fretted snow, rubbery red succulents grow among the stones, and many stones hold fossils from the epochs when these earth summits lay beneath the sea.

  In the snow mountains—is it altitude?—I feel open, dear, and childlike once again. I am bathed by feelings, and unexpectedly I find myself near tears, brought on this time by the memory of an early-morning phone call from the hospital, in the last week of D's life. For days, D had been in what the doctors thought was her last coma, yet a nurse's voice said that my wife wished to speak with me: she had to assure me that there was no mistake. Then I heard this very weak clear voice out of D's childhood, calling as if I were far away across a meadow, "Peter? Peter? Come right away! I'm very very sick!" She must have sensed that she was close to death, and the bewilderment in her voice broke my heart. I ran there through the winter streets, past pinched city faces glaring in suspicion, steam rising from beneath the street in frozen wisps, blowing away.

  Now, halfway around the world, as tears freeze at the corners of my eyes, I hear strange sounds, a yelping like a lonely mountain fox, and a moment later burst out laughing, thinking how D herself would laugh at an idea so delicious as wailing with lost love in the snow mountains. The tears and laughter come and go, and afterward I feel soft, strung out, and relieved magically of the altitude headache with which the day had started.

  At the snowfields depot there is nothing but snow and silence, wind and blue. I rest in the warm sun, enveloped in the soft shroud of white emptiness; my presence in such emptiness seemsnoticed, although no one is here.

  When Phu-Tsering comes, we pitch two tents in the gravel gully between drifts; the loads lie in a mist of wind-blown snow. My missing stave is here, stuck in a snowbank by the B'on-po who made off with it when he passed my tent at the start of yesterday's climb. Now Dawa arrives, it is just past noon, and when we finish these chapatis, we shall carry three loads to the pass, descending again to this camp for the night Despite his bitter experience in the Dhaulagiris, Dawa wears a rag over his eyes only because I forbade him to leave camp without it. Earlier this year, he worked at the base camp of an American expedition to Annapurna Four: he has had no experience as a mountaineer, and not much, it appears, as a grown man.

  It is windless and hot, and the knee-deep snow has softened in the sun, and our boots break through the steps made by GS's party while the snow was hard yesterday morning. I am toting a burlap sack of lentils in a broken basket, and can testify that the porters would have quit within the first one hundred yards in the unlikely event that GS had charmed them into going on. The thin straps bite at my shoulders, the broken wicker stabs holes in my parka, and the basket itself on its crude harness rolls heavily from side to side, throwing me off-balance: I pant so in the thin air that I feel sick. I keep my gaze fixed on the misted footprints that weave back and forth up the steep slope, so as not to be disheartened by the distance still to go; the sun is shimmering in waves off the bright snow.

  With no landmarks, only this hallucinating whiteness blurred by the salt sweat in my vision, the way to the pass mounts in crazy spirals to a white crescent on the blue. From somewhere comes the rumble of an avalanche. Here I am at 17,000 feet, in desperate need of air; instead, I am floundering through soft snow beneath sixty pounds of lentils. Every few feet, I come to a gasping halt, lungs bursting. The stress brings an upsurge of yesterday's rage; I curse the thrift that has brought us, so to speak, to this pretty pass. Today we shall have carried loads from Cave Camp to the Kang, four thousand feet up through ice and heavy snow; two more load
s apiece must come up from the Snow-fields Camp tomorrow. Why aren't GS and Jang-bu back today to help? Why are we setting out willow sticks for Tukten and Gyaltsen, when it is plain that the absent Sherpas will never get this far without a guide? If GS had packed a sack of lentils more than a thousand feet up a steep slope, knee-deep in this blazing slush, he would send no more damned messages about two easy trips a day.

  Then I come to my senses, as if hearing a distant bell: all this raging is absurd. I know this man, and if he has stayed in Shey (the alternative explanation for his absence—accident—is unthinkable) he has good reason. My anger is wasting energy I badly need, and realizing this, it is easy to put it aside.

  As the slopes steepen, I am almost on all fours, knuckles brushing the snow, and this simian stance shifts the weight forward, saving my lacerated shoulders. Three thoughts carry me ahead: the prospect of the northward view over Dolpo to Tibet; the prospect of a free descent across these brilliant snowfields to hot tea and biscuits; and the perception—at this altitude, extremely moving—that these two hands I see before me in the sun, bracing the basket straps, hands square and brown and wrinkled with the scars of life, are no different from the old hands of my father. Simultaneously, I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.

  Three hours of brute labor are required to reach the pass, where a very cold wind from the north makes us lie flat out on our bellies. What the Kang turns out to be is the only point on a narrow spine between two crags where a descent might be attempted into the great snow bowl beyond. Even here, the drop in the first hundred feet is too precipitous for creatures without hands; a slip would mean a roll and tumble of a good half-mile.

  At 17,800 feet, Kang La is much higher than any peak in the United States outside Alaska, yet in three directions rise mountains of greater altitude, for excepting Tibet, Nepal is the highest country in the world. The horizon north across the mountains, in deep purple shadow, is the Land of B'od. These ravines on the north side of the Kang are deep in twilight; one of them must lead down to Shey Gompa.

  Confronted with this emptiness, it is not hard to imagine that somewhere down among those peaks— like that green place under the Jang Pass in the Saure ravine—the center of the world, Shambala, might exist. Tradition says that the venerable Lao-tzu, having propounded the Tao to the Keeper of the Pass, vanished with his ox into such emptiness; so did Bodhi-dharma, the First Patriarch, who carried the Dharma from India to China. But what I see in this first impression is a chaos of bright spires, utterly lifeless, without smoke or track or hut or passing bird.

  To the south, under the Kanjirobas, the point of brown color that is camp lies in full sun. I retreat down the snow slopes, starting to run, as the oppression of that northern prospect lifts away. The glaciers glow in sunset light, as the ice face of Kanjiroba comes in view. In the last of a flying, swift descent I leap and bound.

  At sundown, a black eagle crosses between peaks; then bitter cold descends from the swift fierce stars. With no fuel to spare, we turn in quickly, to wait out the night.

  OCTOBER 30

  At daybreak, when I peek out at the still universe, ice fills my nostrils; I crouch back in my sleeping bag, cover my head. If GS and Jang-bu do not come today, there are hard decisions to be made. Since our path of retreat is a descent down icy boulders, there is no place to be caught in a storm, and, anyway, we cannot stay, as fuel is almost gone. The spell of silence on this place is warning that no man belongs here.

  At dawn, the camp is visited by ravens. Then a cold sun rises to the rim of the white world, bringing light wind.

  This morning we shall carry three more loads up to Kang La, and then three more. That will make nine; there are fourteen altogether. To avoid the bitter cold, we wait until the sun touches the slopes, then climb hard to take advantage of the snow crust, reaching the pass in an hour and a half. In the snowbound valleys to the north, still in night shadow, there is no sign of our companions, no sign of any life at all.

  The sherpas start down immediately; they, too, seem oppressed by so much emptiness. Left alone, I am overtaken by that northern void—no wind, no cloud, no track, no bird, only the crystal crescents between peaks, the ringing monuments of rock that, freed from the talons of ice and snow, thrust an implacable being into the blue. In the early light, the rock shadows on the snow are sharp; in the tension between light and dark is the power of the universe. This stillness to which all returns, this is reality, and soul and sanity have no more meaning here than a gust of snow; such transience and insignificance are exalting, terrifying, all at once, like the sudden discovery, in meditation, of one's own transparence. Snow mountains, more than sea or sky, serve as a mirror to one's own true being, utterly still, utterly clear, a void, an Emptiness without life or sound that carries in Itself all life, all sound. Yet as long as I remain an "I" who is conscious of the void and stands apart from it, there will remain a snow mist on the mirror.

  A silhouette crosses the white wastes below, a black coil dangling from its hand. It is Dawa Sherpa carrying tump line and headband, yet in this light, a something moves that is much more than Dawa. The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow. I flush with feeling, moved beyond my comprehension, and once again, the warm tears freeze upon my face. These rocks and mountains, all this matter, the snow itself, the air—the earth is ringing. All is moving, full of power, full of light.

  Eager to make my second climb while the snow is firm, I travel quickly. This time I have a sack of onions in my basket—how onion is this onion reek in the stiff snowbound air!—and the onions seem much heavier than, in their onion nature, they have any right to be. Later I find that the sly Phu-Tsering has cached two gallons of cooking oil beneath the onions; he giggles gleefully behind me.

  Already the snow has lost its edge, and I break through here and there on the ascent: this trip takes a good half hour longer than the first, although an hour less than yesterday. The pass is reached a short time after noon, and Phu-Tsering, first to gaze down into the snow bowl, turns back toward me, his grin of pleasure turning to a frown. "There is Chorch," He sighs. "No porters." Wearily, Dawa and I sit back against bare scree to shed our harness. Far below, Chorch in his bright-blue parka is plodding upward; lower still, Jang-bu rests on a white rock. In full sun, the mountains to the north look less forbidding, but it is clear from the way GS is moving that the route to Shey lies under heavy snow. We gaze down, stupefied, as the hot sweat on our backs turns cold.

  Today the thin air and heavy load bother me less than the shining snow, which after two days has cooked my head, eyes, brains, and all—in my addlement, I reel around on the high rim of the world. Phu-Tsering and Dawa are also burned and dizzy— Dawa, despite repeated warnings, is still careless about his eye rag—and as we are hungry after our two climbs, we descend to Snowfields Camp again without waiting for GS and Jang-bu. Though none of us say so, we are all disheartened; this job of moving fourteen loads from Snowfields Camp up over Kang La and down to Shey will have to be finished by just five of us.

  In early afternoon, our friends reach camp with their bad tidings: at Shey, there are no porters and no food. The early October storms that held us up in Dhorpatan have been blizzards in these peaks, just as we feared, and the unseasonal snow had caused the people to lock up the Crystal Monastery, abandon Shey, and cross the eastern mountains to Saldang, leaving two women to guard the remnant stores.

  GS brings up of his own accord what he refers to as his "curt note" of two days before, explaining that it was so cold and windy at the Kang Pass that he could not write more than bare essentials; he had ordered me to pay off the two Ring-mos because his frozen fingers could not count out money, which might have blown away into Tibet. I admit to him that I didn't care much for the note and offer to say why, but he anticipates my objections, saying that the note meant no criticism of my actions but only recognition that my instincts about the route had been correct, whereas he had held us up by "waiting too long on the wro
ng mountain." That he wrote it as he did, and that I took it so amiss, he ascribes to the pressure of the days preceding and also to the high-altitude irritability that has ruined so many mountain expeditions. Everything he says rings true to me, and I feel foolish: I recall my first visit to high altitudes, in the Andes, when I was so volatile that any sudden noise inspired fury. Quickly and happily we drop the entire business. We are glad to see each other—and a good thing, too, since in this camp we shall have to share this one small tent—and full of excitement about Shey, for there is good news too: the blue sheep there are plentiful and tame, and the rut we have come so far to see has scarcely started. Early tomorrow, if fair weather holds, we shall pack the last five loads up to Kang La, then slide all fourteen down the northern face to a strange black tarn in the bottom of the snow bowl. From there the load will be moved in relays, three hours downriver to Shey. At Snowfields Camp we shall leave a cairn with food for Tukten and Gyaltsen, and instructions to ignore advice from the denizens of Ring-mo and to push on to Shey; being lightly loaded, they might reach Shey from Snowfields Camp in a half day. If the pass is closed by blizzard, they should try to reach us by a long alternate route, from Murwa by way of Saldang; there are three high passes on that route, say the Shey women, but none of them is so formidable as this one. All else failing, they are to await us at Dunahi.

  In a dream I am walking joyfully up the mountain. Something breaks and falls away, and all is light. Nothing has changed, yet all is amazing, luminescent, free. Released at last, I rise into the sky.... This dream comes often. Sometimes I run, then lift up like a kite, high above earth, and always I sail transcendent for a time before awaldng. I choose to awake, for fear of falling, yet such dreams tell me that I am a part of things, if only I would let go, and keep on going. "Do not be heavy," Soen Roshi says. "Be light, light, light— full of light!"