The Snow leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

  The route from Gijan goes west along a mountain ridge to a high point with a view of four deep valleys. Below, in the village where the Modir meets the Jare, a woman sits in a window frame of old carved birds. The Modir is crossed on a wooden bridge with chain rail; the bridge sways and creaks over gray torrents that rush down from the Annapurna glaciers to the north.

  A rice-field path follows narrow dikes worn to grease by human feet. A mist along the mountains: heavy heat. The green rice, red huts, the red clothes of the women point up the darkness of these valleys. Away from the rivers, a rooster's cry cracks the still air, or an outraged human voice— a woman ranting at her buffalo, gone brooding in the pines, or the vacant laugh of a crazy man echoing outward toward the mountains.

  Sun in the wings of dragonflies, over a meadow still in shadow: a dove calls from the secrets of the mountains. Now Machapuchare rises, a halo of cloud wisps spun in a tight whorl around the pinnacle. (Unlike the other peaks of the Annapurna massif, Machapuchare remains pristine, not because it is impregnable—it was climbed to within fifty feet of the summit in 1957— but because to set foot on the peak is forbidden; the Gurung revere it as a holy mountain, and the Nepal government wisely preserves it in mysterium tremendutn.) Soon all Annapurna is high and clear, turning minutely all day long as the trail moves westward. In 1950, the westernmost summit, known as Annapurna One, became the first peak of 25,000 feet or more that man had climbed.

  How easy it feels to be superfluous on this expedition, in no haste and without gainful destination— gnaskor, or "going around places," as pilgrimages are described in Tibet. GS is back there harrying the porters, who overlook no opportunity to rest; the sherpas pretend to help him, but they know that the porters will not walk more than seven hours if they can help it and, lacking tents, are usually aware before they set out in the morning of the hut or cave where they will spend the night GS knows this, too, but he also knows that the season is against him, and he will not really be at ease until he reaches the land of the blue sheep and the snow leopard. "Once the data start coming in," he said in Kathmandu, "I don't care about much else; I feel I'm justifying my existence." (This single-mindedness helps to account for his reputation: I have heard GS referred to by a peer as "the finest field biologist working today.") Also, he dislikes all these small villages; we are still too close to civilization to suit him. "The fewer people, the better," he says often. Originally he wished to fly this small expedition to the strip at Dhorpatan, a settlement of Tibetan refugees to the west, where all the porters that we needed might be foimd. But no plane was available until the second week of October, and with the weather still uncertain, it seemed best to make the trek to Dhorpatan on foot. Now he overtakes me, fretting; "It would take us four days to Dhorpatan instead of eight or nine if we didn't have to wait for these damned porters."

  GS sulks, for he knows that there is nothing to be done to speed the pace. "I wish we were up there at eight thousand feet right now—I like crisp air." I do not answer. The porters' pace just suits me, not less so because my boots feel stiff and small. I enjoy crisp air myself, but I am happy in this moment; we shall be up there in cold weather soon enough.

  Glowing with nut grease, a squirrel observes our passing from its perch in a cotton tree (Bombax) in immense red blossom. This relative of the African baobab is often the one wild tree left standing, contributing to the village commons the deer-park aspect that calms this southern countryside. Now the air is struck by the shrill of a single cicada, brilliant, eerie, a sound as fierce as a sword blade shrieking on a lathe, yet subtle, bell-like, with a ring that causes the spider webs to shimmer in the sunlight. I stand transfixed by this unearthly sound that radiates from all the world at once, as Tukten, passing, smiles. In this enigmatic smile there is something of Kasapa. Seeking among his disciples for a successor, Sakyamuni held up a single lotus flower and was silent. Perceiving in this emblematic gesture the unified nature of existence, Kasapa smiled.

  Kusma, a large Hindu village near the Kali Gandaki River, lies at about 3000 feet, nearly the lowest point of altitude on this journey. Phu-Tsering replenishes our supplies with fresh cucumbers and guavas, and by noon we are under way once more, moving north along the eastern bank. In the first village on the river is a small wood temple, with two stone cows decked out in red hibiscus; on a stone head in the temple wall is another unfathomable smile. The village creaks to the soft rhythm of an ancient rice treadle, and under the windows babies sway in wicker baskets. In the serene and indiscriminate domesticity of these sunny villages, sow and piglet, cow and calf, mother and infant, hen and chicks, nanny and kid commingle in a common pulse of being. We eat a papaya at the tea house, and afterward bathe in the deep pools of a mountain torrent that comes foaming down over pale rocks beyond the village. On this last day of September I linger for a while in a warm waterfall, in the moist sun, while my washed clothes bake dry upon the stones.

  AH afternoon the trail continues up the Kali Gandaki, which rushes down from Mustang and Tibet onto the Ganges Plain; because it flows between the soaring massifs of Annapurna and Dhaulagiri, both more than 26,000 feet in altitude,4 the Kali Gandaki has the deepest canyon of any river in the world. Kali signifies "black female" or "dark woman," and it is true that its steep walls, gray torrent, and black boulders give a hellish darkness to this river. Fierce Kali the Black, the female aspect of Time and Death, and the Devourer of All Things, is the consort of die Hindu god of the Himalaya, Great Shiva the Re-Creator and Destroyer; her black image, with its necklace of human skulls, is the emblem of this dark river that, rumbling down out of hidden peaks and vast clouds of unknowing, has filled the traveler with dread since the first human tried to cross and was borne away.

  A far cicada rings high and clear over the river's heavy wash. Morning glory, a lone dandelion, cassia, orchids. So far from the nearest sea, I am taken aback by the sight of a purple land crab, like a relic of the ancient days when the Indian subcontinent, adrift on the earth's mantle, moved northward to collide with the Asian land mass, driving these marine rocks, inch by inch, five miles into the skies: the Kali Gandaki is a famous source of the black sacred stones called saligrams, which contain the spiral fossil forms of marine univalves. The rise of the Himalaya, begun in the Eocene, some fifty million years ago, is still continuing; an earthquake in 1959 caused mountains to fall into the rivers and changed the course of the great Brahmaputra, which comes down out of Tibet through northeastern India to join the Ganges near its delta at the Bay of Bengal. All the great rivers of southern Asia fall from the highest country in the world, from the Indus that empties into the Arabian Sea east to the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, the Mekong and the Yangtze, and even the great Huang Ho that pours eastward across all of China into the Yellow Sea; since they come from the Tibetan Plateau, these rivers are much older than the mountains, and the Kali Gandaki forged its great abysses as the mountains rose.

  At Paniavas, which has a brass cow head on its village font, a bridge crosses the roaring river, and camp is made on the far side in sudden rain. At twilight, I walk beneath the dripping trees. From the hill above, in their bird voices, the Pari children cry out their few phrases of schoolbook English, laughing at my answers.

  Good-a morning!

  What it is you-a name?

  What time it is by you-a watch?

  Where are you-a going?

  OCTOBER 1

  The monsoon rains continue all night long, and in the morning it is cool and cloudy. Along the trail up the Gandaki, there are fewer settlements, fewer stone huts in which travelers may take shelter, and with the north wind comes the uneasy feeling that, in this autumn season, we are bound into the wind, against the weather. Down the river comes a common sandpiper, the Eurasian kin of the spotted sandpiper of home: it teeters and flits from boulder to black boulder, bound for warm mud margins to the south. I have seen this jaunty bird in many places, from Galway to New Guinea, and am cheered a little when I meet it again here.

  U
nder the clouds, the lower flanks of great Dhaulagiri, 26,810 feet high, are white from last night's storm; the snow line is much lower than the altitudes that we must cross to get to Dolpo. This track continues northward to Jamoson and Mustang, and originally we planned to trek as far as Jamoson, then head west into Dolpo by way of Tscharka. But permits to travel beyond Jamoson are difficult to obtain from the Nepal government, which is very sensitive about all of the wild region on the northwest border. Before the Gorkha wars in the late eighteenth century, Dolpo and Mustang were kingdoms of Tibet, a historical fact that might tempt Chinese encroachment. And both regions are hideouts of the fierce Tibetan nomads known as Khampa, who still actively resist the Chinese occupation and retreat to Dolpo and Mustang after their raids. Even in Marco Polo's time, the Khampa were renowned bandits, and from all reports5 are fond of their old habits. Our present route, approaching from the south, lessens the chances of encountering Khampa and drawing attention to a situation that Nepal, for the sake of good relations with its tremendous neighbor, is anxious to ignore.

  A bridge crosses the river to the trade center at Beni, from where another track heads west, under Dhaulagiri. We shall travel in this direction for six days, then round the western end of the Dhaulagiri massif on a route north across the Himalaya. Here at Beni Bazaar, the police are suspicious and aggressive, checking us out with exaggerated care; our permit for Dolpo is uncommon. But at last the papers are returned, and we leave this place as soon as possible.

  The path follows the northern bank of a tributary river, the Magyandi, where the valley sides are too steep for farming, and the few poor hamlets lack even a tea stall. It is October now; the orchids disappear. Across the river, ghostly waterfalls—sometimes six or seven may be seen at once—flow down out of the clouds. A stone millhouse spans the white water of a stream where a ravine strikes into the river; there is no bridge, no sign of life, and the hermit, if he has not died, shares his solitudes with the macaques that perch like sentinels about the silent dwelling.

  A Tibetan with two women overtakes us; he stops short, cocking his head, to look us over, then invites us to accompany him to Dhorpatan. GS and I love to travel light, and would be happy to go with him, but we merely point in the direction of the porters who, as usual, are an hour or more behind.

  We camp by the river at Tatopani, in a heavy rain.

  OCTOBER 2

  Long ago, some traveler brought poinsettia and oleander to Tatopani, and there is a tea stall in this village. Across from the tea stall, on a thatch roof, grows a cucumber with yellow-flowered vine; under the eaves, on the clay windowsill, a flute, a wood comb, and a bright red pepper lie in happy composition. Beneath the windowsill, small children tumble, and one little girl, sedate and serious, changes her clothes from top to bottom. In the mud street, in the rain, three small boys hunching knee to knee play cards beneath a black umbrella.

  At midmorning, we set out in a light rain. The Magyandi is rising, and over the thick rush and leaping of the torrent, the rumble of boulders, southbound swallows fly away down the gray river. Rain comes and goes. At midafternoon, the track arrives at this region's main village, called Darbang, where the slate-roofed houses are strongly built of red and white clay bricks, with carved wood windows.

  On the school veranda, Jang-bu and Phu-Tsering build a fire to dry sleeping bags, which are turned each little while by Dawa and Gyaltsen. Like all sherpa work, this is offered and accomplished cheerfully, and usually Tukten lends a hand, although such help is not expected of the porters and he is not paid for it. The sherpas are alert for ways in which to be of use, yet are never insistent, far less servile; since they are paid to perform a service, why not do it as well as possible? "Here, sir! I will wash the mud!" "I carry that, sir!" As GS says, "When the going gets rough, they take care of you first" Yet their dignity is unassailable, for the service is rendered for its own sake—it is the task, not the employer, that is served. As Buddhists, they know that the doing matters more than the attainment or reward, that to serve in this selfless way is to be free. Because of their belief in karma—the principle of cause and effect that permeates Buddhism and Hinduism (and Christianity, for that matter: as ye sow, so shall ye reap)—they are tolerant and unjudgmental, knowing that bad acts will receive their due without the intervention of the victim. The generous and open outlook of the sherpas, a land of merry defenselessness, is by no means common, even among unsophisticated peoples; I have never encountered it before except among the Eskimos. And since, in prehistory, the nomadic Mongol ancestors of both Tibetans and native Americans are thought to have spread from the same region of northern Asia, I wonder if this sense of life is not a common heritage from the far past

  These simple and uneducated men comport themselves with the wise calm of monks, and their well-being is in no way separable from their religion. And of course they are all incipient Buddhas—we are, too —according to the Mahayana texts compiled several centuries after Sakyamuni's death. Since Mahayana insists on the interdependence of all life and aspires to the salvation of all beings, not Just those who follow monastic orders, it does not demand renunciation of ordinary life (though it is expected that renunciation will later come about of its own accord) and is less narrow in all respects than the Hinayana of Ceylon and Southeast Asia, which adheres closely to the early Buddhism of Sakyamimi As in the Hebrew and Christian traditions, which were developing in the same period, Mahayana suggests that spiritual attainment will be limited in him who seeks God only for himself: "Hast thou attuned thy being to humanity's great pain, O Candidate for Light!"6 Thus there developed the ideal of the Bodhisattva (roughly, Buddha-Being) who has deferred his own entry into the eternal peace of nirvana, remaining here in the samsara state until all of us become enlightened; in this way Mahayana answered man's need for a personal god and a divine savior, which early Buddhism and Hinayana lack. Mahayana lies at the foundation of the Tantric Buddhism of the Himalaya, Tibet, and Central Asia, as well as that extraordinary sect that developed in China, traveled eastward to Korea and Japan, and is now established in the United States.

  The traditional founder of Ch'an Buddhism (in Japan, Zen) was Bodhidharma, a great teacher in the apostolic line of Sakyamimi, who carried the teaching from India to China in a.d. 527. Perhaps influenced by the simplicity of the Chinese philosophy called Tao (the Way), the fierce "blue-eyed monk," or "wall-gazer," exhorted his followers to ignore the sectarian disputes, ponderous scriptures, proliferating icons, and priestly trappings of organized religion and return to the intense meditation that had opened the Buddha's Path. Led by a succession of great masters, Zen Buddhism (of which Bodhidharma was First Patriarch in China) infused all of Oriental art and culture with the spare clarity of its vision. In Zen thought, even attachment to lie Buddha's "golden words" may get in the way of ultimate perception; hence the Zen expression "Kill the Buddha!" The Universe itself is the scripture of Zen, for which religion is no more and no less than the apprehension of the infinite in every moment.

  "How wondrous, how mysterious,

  I carry fuel, I draw water."7

  OCTOBER 3

  From the river above Darbang comes evil thunder. The cliffs are falling, and three wet dogs that scavenge in the schoolyard turn to listen. Rocks tremble and bound into the river, which after two days of heavy rain is rushing, roaring, lunging through the canyon.

  The daily rain is nagging at our nerves, and mine especially, since my cramped and ratty tent leaks very badly. Hunched in a cold and soggy sleeping bag amongst the puddles, I have envied the owner of the crisp blue tent next door, and perhaps these base feelings fired our first argument, this dark morning, when GS tossed used cans and papers into the schoolyard. He asserted that he did so because the local people are always avid for containers, which is true. But why not set the cans upon the wall instead of littering the place, and making the people pick them up out of the mud?

  Beneath GS's stem control are gleams of anger, it appears, although he talks little o
f himself—there isn't much to go on. Essentially, I think, he is a solitary; a certain shy warmth is most apparent when he speaks of crows and pigs. Last year in New York, he said, "Perhaps you can teach me how to write about people; I don t know how to go about it." This sort of open and lonely remark redeems his sternness and an occasional lack of proportion brought about by sheer intensity. "When Kay is typing up my notes, and I don't hear the typewriter," he says, "I go and ask her what's the matter: she gets wild at me." He often says this—"Kay gets wild at me"—as if to remind himself that his wife may have good reason.

  In the Serengeti, GS was much respected and well liked, and he has fine, old-fashioned qualities in abundance. His mix of brains, strength, and integrity is not so common, and counts for a lot on an expedition such as ours: how many of one's friends, these days, could be entrusted with one's life?

  When the rain relents a bit, we straggle out, but soon a man coming from the west warns Phu-Tsering about danger on the trails. Phu-Tsering, who is never serious if he can help it, murmurs, "Two day rain—very bad," making a sliding motion with his brown hand. In places the ledge trail has collapsed into the river, and elsewhere slides have buried it in an avalanche of shale. Crossing these places, the porters stare upward through the restless mists at the overhanging rocks. The young Tamang porter Pirim has a scrap of English, and as he passes me, remarks, "Today, tomorrow, trail no good." To assure me that he is serious, he swings with his heavy load to gaze at me from beneath the tump line around his forehead, then hobbles on along the path that climbs up this steep canyon. Such warnings, according to GS, are apt to precede threats to quit or demands for higher pay, but later, commanding the porters to stay closer together, he acknowledges the perilous conditions: "If one of these chaps slips," he says, "well never miss him until the end of the day." Not long afterward we must clamber up through bushes, since a whole traverse has fallen down the mountain.