The Snow leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

  The Tamangs come, then the Tarakots, and we descend steeply to a brushy gulley, where the porters throw their baskets down and start a fire, in preparation for the first of their two meals. After their hard climb, this is understandable, but after our wait of an hour and a half, it is damned frustrating; in the long delay, we assumed they must have eaten. We curse them as we have each day for not taking this main meal before starting out, when fires are already built, and water boiling; this two-hour stop, more days than not, has meant wasting warm sunny hours on the trail and setting up camp in rain, cold, and near-darkness.

  The new delay makes GS desperate: we are sure to miss the blue-sheep rut if we don't move faster. But the porters can see the snow that fills the north end of this canyon; chivvy them as we may, they will go no farther than that snow this afternoon.

  Ranging back and forth, GS nags Phu-Tsering about wasting sugar and cooking precious rice instead of using the potatoes, which are heavy and still locally available. The cook's happy-go-lucky ways can be exasperating, although GS learned in eastern Nepal that his merry smile more than compensates for any failings. And the sherpas accept his reprimands in good spirit, since GS is faithfully considerate of their feelings and concerned about their welfare, and rarely permits their childlike natures to provoke him.

  Since no brush occurs between this point and the far side of Jang La, we scavenge shrubby birch and rhododendron and gather old stalks of bamboo, which flowers every twelve or thirteen years, then dies over vast areas. In a semi-cave I find some faggots left half-burnt by other travelers, and bind them across my rucksack with the rest.

  The trail ascends the torrent called Seng Khola, under looming cliffs, and in this gloom, in the roar of the gray water, I half expect the visage of a mountain god to peer over the knife edge of the rim. Clouds creep after us, up the canyon, and for once skies look more promising ahead: a shaft of sun that lights the snow at the head of the Seng Khola is a beacon. Then come the first gray drops of rain, this cold rain with a cold wind behind it that overtakes us every afternoon. The river is somber, with broken waterfalls and foaming rock, in a wasteland of sere stubble and spent stone, and I wonder why, in this oppressive place, I feel so full of well-being, striding on through the rain, and grateful in some unnameable way—to what? On the path, the shadow of my close-cropped head is monkish, and the thump of my stave resounds in the still mountains: I feel inspired by Milarepa as described by one of his disciples, walking "free as an unbridled lion in the snowy ranges"

  At a canyon bend stands the headman of Tarakot, who wears Hindu puttees and carries no pack of any kind. He is pointing at the bouldered slopes across the stream. "Na!" he cries. "Na!" Then he goes on. A pale form jumps across a gully, followed quickly by six more; the animals move up a steep slope to a haze of green between the rocks and snow. I watch them climb until, at snow line, they are swept up and consumed by clouds that have rushed up the valley from the south: this wonderful silver-blue-gray creature is the bharal, the blue sheep of the Himalaya—in Tibetan, na—that we have come so far to see.

  We camp on a flat ledge by the river, just beneath the snows. A dipper plunges into the cold torrent, and a pair of redstarts pursue some tardy insect over the black boulders. The altitude is nearly 13,000 feet, says GS as he comes up: it is dark and cold. GS, too, has seen blue sheep, and later, after tents are pitched, he goes out and finds more. He returns at dusk, delighted —"The first data in a month and a half!" he cries. And I tell him of a small find of my own. Back down the trail there was a solitary print, as if a dog had crossed the path and gone its way, leaving no trace on the stony ground to either side. There were no signs of human travelers on the wet earth, and the print was fresh. Therefore a dog seemed most unlikely, and having assumed it was a wolf, which still occurs in the wilder regions of Tibet, I had not checked for foretoes on the print "This is perfect country for the snow leopard" says GS. The headman of Tarakot declares that snow leopards occur here in the Jang region, but the all-knowing Tukten shakes his head. "Only on Dolpo side" says Tukten, "not in Nepal." Dolpo lies on the Tibetan Plateau, and it interests me that he regards it as a foreign land.

  In his abrupt way, more in exuberance than rudeness, my friend hurls goggles through my tent flap, to protect my eyes from tomorrow's sun and snow. Excited, I lie awake much of the night, my head out of the tent. The night is clear, clear, clear and very cold. Before dawn, black turns black-blue over the mountains, and there is fire-glow high in the heavens.

  OCTOBER 15

  We set out before daybreak, crossing a treacherous ice glaze on stream boulders, following the Seng Khola northward. In the solitudes of snow far up the canyon, we come on barefoot human prints. "Yeti," GS says, sardonic, but even for him, the sight is startling, unsettling; something is imminent in this frozen shadow world below the sun. Then the world stirs. In the half-light, a bent figure moves under overhanging rocks across the torrent, cowled, ragged, brown, with a long stave—a mountain lunatic, a sennin. Though howling, he cannot be heard over the roaring water; he brandishes his stick.

  Astonished, we see that this cowled figure is Bimbahadur; he tries to indicate the direction of the trail. Later we learn that he had walked three miles upriver in the rain, the night before, to sleep alone in a cave of his own ken, and was now on his way down again to fetch his load. To attain solitude, the oldest and slowest of the porters has given himself an additional six miles of stony walking.

  Leaving the river, we climb toward the northwest.

  Higher, where the snow has melted, a fox jumps from tussock grass and runs to a group of rocks, then turns to watch. Its black points and rich red coat are set off by a frosty face and chest and an extraordinary long thick tail, dark brown and black with a white fluffy tip; the tip remains visible long after the creature's flowing colors sink among the stones.

  The light on the upper slopes slowly descends the mountain: where we have climbed is still in deep night shadow. Meeting the sun, I rest on the dry lichens that crown a granite islet in the whiteness. Three snow pigeons pass overhead, white wings cracking in the frozen air. To the east, a peak of Dhaulagiri shimmers in a halo of sun rays, and now the sun itself bursts forth, incandescent in a sky without a cloud, an ultimate blue that south over India is pale and warm, and cold deep dark in the north over Tibet —a blue bluer than blue, transparent, ringing. (Yet that "blue" went unperceived until quite recent times: in the many hundred allusions to the sky in the Rig Veda, the Greek epics, even the Bible, there is no mention of this color.6)

  GS, who is a mountaineer, tells me to hold my stave short, on the uphill side, the better to punch it through the crust should my boots slip, for the slope is very steep and the snow is glazed. But he interrupts himself, dropping to one knee and pointing upward, even as he digs into his rucksack for binoculars. Four bharal rams pick and jump on the white outcrops, climbing the ridge, the big horned heads outlined on the blue. We are delighted by this sight, all the more so because this fellowship of rams is sign that the autunm rut has not begun, that after all we may reach Shey in time.

  I find the going hard. The footing is treacherous, the air thin, the brightness dazzling, and I am breaking through the crust up to the crotch. In the next hour, GS moves steadily ahead, until his blue parka turns to black against the snow. The emblematic figure rounds a pyramid of white; then there is nothing.

  Out of nothingness comes a faint whispering. Fine crystals dance upon the light as snow falls from high monuments of rock. A bird has flown north toward Tibet, a small white falcon. In vertigo caused by exhaustion and the glare, staring straight up at this heraldic bird, I gasp for breath; there is no white falcon in the Himalaya. (Later this day I saw a merlin-sized falcon with black mantle, white beneath; passing overhead, it would have seemed to be a pure-white bird.)

  Snowfields climb in sparkling curves into the blue. As the sun rises, I plunge over and over through the weakening crust, and stop every few steps to grab for breath. In late morning, a
fter a four-hour climb, I reach the ridge, and crouch to escape the icy wind cutting across it. "I made it," I blurt out, head spinning. GS is scanning with binoculars. "There's no pass here," he says. "No way to go on." Over the rim lies an awesome drop to the floor of a broad canyon, and the line of porters is just visible, ascending this canyon into the northwest. The four-hour climb to 15,000 feet has been in vain; we misread Bimbahadnr's signal, and will have to backtrack down this mountain, and then climb anew.

  The splendor of Churen Himal and Putha Hiunchuli, east of us now instead of north, does not console me. In silence, we eat a bit of sausage and a handful of peanuts, then start back along the ridge, in search of a short and safe route down. (GS's idea of a safe route is not the same as mine. After so many years in the high mountains in pursuit of animals, his step and balance are marvelously sure: one of my first impressions of this man, in East Africa, in 1969, was the sight of him standing casually on the very edge of a towering granite outcrop, in hard wind, scanning the Serengeti Plain through these same binoculars.)

  A band of thirteen bharal, caught dozing in the snow, jumps up as one animal just yards away. Wild sheep are unwary when approached from above, being conditioned to expect danger from below, and in this wonderful light, the blue-silver creatures observe us calmly before moving off, while GS classifies them as to sex and age, photographs them thoroughly, and scribbles data in his notebook. Then a Himalayan snow cock, white and gray, goes sailing past, gliding down around the mountains—why had it come so high, to this deep snow?

  An hour later, having stumbled and slid down the canyon side, we start a new ascent to the northwest. Out of the wind, in the clarion air, the sun burns very hot, and in this flux of white and blue, I feel dizzy and half-blind. My legs are gone, and the valley snow has turned to mush that engulfs the knees at every other step. The one consolation is a grim relief that the pony man quit us when he did, for his animals could not have made it, and we would have been stuck in deep, wet snow with seven extra loads.

  At 14,000 feet, the ascent eases, and there is a fine cross-country trek over the snowfields. In mid-afternoon, the sun sinks behind a ridge, but an hour later it bursts forth once more in a startling way, filling the mouth of a ravine far down among the mountains. Moments later, it is gone again. In twilight, we cross the Sauxe Khola and bivouac on a bluff.

  For most of this afternoon we trailed the porters, one of whom left a blood spoor in the snow; as it turns out, this was Pirim, who failed the wear the sneakers issued him and cut his leather feet on the icy crusts. The blood spots made us wonder if any of the porters had taken precautions against snow blindness; by the time we overtook them, any warnings would have been too late. But this evening, although three complain a little of sore eyes, they seem cheerful enough, taking turns at the telescope and shouting at some na high on the ridge. The Tamangs make wind shelters in the ruins of some herdsmen's fallen huts, and the Sherpas take the headman into their tent, but the Tarakots are satisfied to hunch like growths among the snow patches, wrapped in old blankets, doing nothing at all to better their condition, despite the prospect of a long night of bitter cold. They have carried no firewood, and must scavenge rice from us, and most are barefoot

  OCTOBER 16

  Last night I dined in GS's tent—two people cannot fit into mine—and though elated by the day in the snow mountains, I was reeling with the altitude, with a bad headache, and a face baked stiff by sun. This morning I am fine again, but not so the poor porters. All are moaning with snow blindness, a very disagreeable burning of the corneas which comes on with little warning and has no cure other than time; the sensation is that of sand thrown in the eyes. The Tarakots are still huddled in their pile outside our tents, blowing pathetically through cloths into each other's eyes. Refusing to carry, they stagger off eventually toward home.

  Our own porters are suffering, too, and so are the Sherpa camp assistants, who should have known better. Only Phu-Tsering looks happy as ever; he is actually amused. "Solu!" he says of Dawa and Gyaltsen, referring to a valley clan; they are not true mountaineers such as himself. Phu-Tsering comes from Khumbu, southwest of Everest, where most high-altitude Sherpas are born; he has accompanied expeditions that climbed Makalu (French, 1971: 27,790') and Manaslu (German, 1973: 26,658') and has all sorts of certificates. The cook has his own snow goggles; Jang-bu, though improvident, had borrowed a spare pair from GS; and Tukten and two of the Tamangs had sense enough to tie slitted rags around their heads, to squint through—but why didn't all have sense enough? GS, disgusted, says he is continually astonished by the poor adaptation of Himalayan peoples to their environment

  And so we are stuck in the snows for another day, and perhaps more. Unlike the Tarakots, our own brave invalids consent to carry lightened loads, although they stagger and moan each time we glance at them. They bind on eye rags without slits, and the ever-cool, resilient Jang-bu leads them off into the snows like a chain of blind, hoping to return from Tarakot tomorrow with new porters. Phu-Tsering will stay to cook for us and guard the camp, and Bimbahadur will also stay, being too far gone to walk. His eyes are swollen tight and his legs are rickety; as if some spell had been cast upon him, he has turned overnight into a dotard. Yesterday, as we caught up with him, he stumbled and fell on the ice and toppled his basket, and Phu-Tsering and Jang-bu had to retrieve his load from the bottom of a steep incline of ice and snow. Now GS fixes him a tea-leaf poultice, which seems to ease his pain a little, and later I daub some cream on his broken lips, and this poor old man, who only came with us from Dhorpatan because he wanted to be helpful, groans with the ordeal of life on his crude bed of straw in the ruined hut.

  GS frets about time lost and additional expense, but there are blue sheep here, and he'll make the most of them. Having pitched our tents again, we set off up the steep mountain, which has open grass on these lower slopes due to south exposure. Soon a hill fox appears, intent upon its hunting; ignoring us, it makes six pounces in eight minutes, four of them successful, though its game is small. One victim is a mouse— mouse holes and snow tunnels, exposed by thaw, are everywhere around our feet—and two more, seen through the spotting scope, look like big grasshoppers, and the fourth is a long thin gleam of life that is perplexing. Later, when the sun is high, I find some shiny striped gray skinks that solve the mystery. Despite the unseasonal blizzards of the late monsoon, this mid-autmnn mountainside is still alive, and the seeds and myriad insects stuck to the snow patches attract the migrant redstarts as well as large mixed flocks of pipits, larks, rose finches, and the like. Dwarf rhododendron, edelweiss, blue gentian occur sparsely, and above 15,000 feet, wherever stone protrudes, bright lichens of all colors deck the snow. The white is patterned by the pretty tracks of snow cock, blue sheep, fox, and smaller creatures: we look in vain for the pug marks of snow leopard. And soon we drift apart like grazing animals, in silence, as we do almost every day along the trail. GS pursues three blue sheep that move diagonally up the slope, while I climb to the base of a huge rock pile on the sky.

  In a niche of lichens, out of the cold wind, I contemplate the still white mountains to the south. The effect of sun and light here is so marked that south slopes with north exposure are locked in snow right down to the river, while on this north side, facing south, the slopes are open. Thus, one bank of the Saure is a sheet of white, while across the torrent, a few yards away, the warm grass swarms with grasshoppers and skinks.

  Overhead, pale griffons turn on the deep blue. How silent vultures are! From this aerie, no sound can be heard but the rush of the Saure torrent far below.

  Traversing the slope to its north ridge, I scan the valley that leads north to the Jang, then return slowly down the mountain. Phu-Tsering gives me warm chapatis, and hot water for a wash in the cold sun. He is wearing his amulets outside his shirt, but tucks them away, embarrassed, when I ask about them; they were given him by his lama, he murmurs, feeling much better when I show him that I, too, wear an "amulet," a talisman given to me by
the Zen master Soen Roshi, "my lama in Japan." He admires this smooth plum pit on which a whole ten-phrase sutra is inscribed in minute characters, and is awed when I tell him that the sutra honors the most revered of all those mythical embodiments of Buddhahood called Bodhisattvas, the one known to Phu-Tsering as "Chen-resigs" (literally, sPyan ras gzigs), who is the Divine Protector of Tibet and is invoked by OM MANI PADME HUM. In the Japanese sutra inscribed upon this plum pit, this Bodhisattva is Kanzeon, or Kannon (in China, Kuan Yin; in southeast Asia, Quon Am). To Hindus He is Padmapani, and in Sanskrit, He is Avalokita Ishvara, the Lord Who Looks Down (in compassion). Like all Bodhisattvas, Avalokita represents "the divine within" sought by mystics of all faiths, and has been called the Lord Who is Seen Within.7

  Like most good Buddhists, Phu-Tsering chants OM MANI PADME HUM each day, and in time of stress; he also clings to fear of demons, and is frightened by the dark. Walking behind GS one night in eastern Nepal, he chanted this mantra so incessantly that GS longed to throw him off the cliff. But the faithful believe that the invocation of any deity by his mantra will draw benevolent attention, and since om mani padme hum is dedicated to the Great Compassionate Chenresigs, it is found inscribed on prayer stones, prayer wheels, prayer flags, and wild rocks throughout the Buddhist Himalaya.

  Pronounced in Tibet Aum — Ma-ni — Pay-may — Hung, this mantra may be translated: Om!The Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus! Hum! The deep, resonant Om is all sound and silence throughout time, the roar of eternity and also the great stillness of ptire being; when intoned with the prescribed vibrations, it invokes the All that is otherwise inexpressible. The mani is the "adamantine diamond" of the Void—the primordial, pure, and indestructible essence of existence beyond all matter or even antimatter, all phenomena, all change, and all becoming.Padme —in the lotus— is the world of phenomena, samsara, unfolding with spiritual progress to reveal beneath the leaves of delusion the mani-jewel of nirvana, that lies not apart from daily life but at its heart. Hum has no literal meaning, and is variously interpreted (as is all of this great mantra, about which whole volumes have been written). Perhaps it is simply a rhythmic exhortation, completing the mantra and inspiring the chanter, a declaration of being, of Is-ness, symbolized by the Buddha's gesture of touching the earth at the moment of Enlightenment. Itis! It exists! All that is or was or will ever be is right here in this moment! Now!