The Snow leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

  At the fire, we cook rice before dusk falls; and afterward, I climb the hill and sit under a pine and watch the stars appear over Tibet. Then the planet Mars, bright orange-gold, rises swiftly over night snows in the northeast. How clear it is! How imminent!

  An owl hoots, deep in the black needles.

  Whooo—ooo.

  OCTOBER 18

  I am up before the sun, and make a fire. The water boils as the sun ignites the peaks, and we breakfast in sunshine on hot tea and porridge. A nutcracker is rasping in the pines, and soon the crows come, down the morning valley; cawing, they hide among long shimmering needles, then glide in, bold, to walk about in the warming scent of resin, dry feet scratching on the bark of fallen trees.

  Since Jang-bu cannot reach Tarakot before the evening, we have time. I walk barefoot in the grass, spreading my gear with ceremony: today, for the first time in weeks, everything will dry, a great event in expedition life. Then with my stave I prop my pack upright and sit back against the mountainside, my face in cold shade and hot sun on my arms and belly.

  Pine needles dance in a light breeze against the three white sister peaks to the northwest. I sit in silence, lost in the burning hum of mountain bees. An emerald butterfly comes to my knee to dry its wings, gold wings with black specks above, white polka dots beneath. Through the frozen atmospheres, the sun is burning.

  In the clearness of this Himalayan air, mountains draw near, and in such splendor, tears come quietly to my eyes and cool on my sunburned cheeks. This is not mere soft-mindedness, nor am I all that silly with the altitude. My head has cleared in these weeks free of intrusions—mail, telephones, people and their needs— and I respond to things spontaneously, without defensive or self-conscious screens. Still, all this feeling is astonishing: not so long ago I could say truthfully that I had not shed a tear in twenty years.

  In the early afternoon, we go down through the hill pastures to Tarakot, a group of villages set on terraces high above the upper Bheri, near the confluence of the Tarap River with smaller streams that come down off Dhalagiri. In the days before the Gorkhas made a nation of Nepal, this medieval place was the capital of the old kingdom of Tichu-Rong (from the Tibetan: Valley of Fragrant Waters), and it is still known to its inhabitants as Dzong (the Fortress). Seen from above, in the distilled air, Tarakot seems not quite real; the sunlight is too soft, too gilded, and the shade too black, as in an illuminated painting from some ancient book.

  On the hillside above Tarakot is a pageant of tall poles crowned by symbols of sun, moon, and fire; brown, white, and gray Tibetan ponies graze among white prayer flags, which snap OM MANI PADME HUM on the autumn wind. (Is it the flag that moves? Is it the wind? Neither, said Hui-Neng, the sixth Ch'an Buddhist Patriarch of China: It is your mind. The Sixth Patriarch's comment is treasured to this day by Zen roshis and Tibetan lamas alike.)

  The path winds among potato patches and terraces of red buckwheat. Under the eaves of a lone hut, a bright-colored fresco in blue, gold, green, and red portrays seven Buddha figures in symbolic postures that represent idealized aspects of Sakyamuni's life. These Buddha aspects, "celestial Buddhas," Bodhisattvas, and other embodiments of Buddhahood are all given separate names and attributes; and in these Himalayan lands, the chaotic nature of Buddhist iconography is compounded by the fact that everywhere, and almost from the start, Buddhists have adapted and adopted local deities rather than eradicate the old religions, so that even the most pernicious demon might be sanctified as a "Protector of the Dharma." Then, in the first centuries after Sakyamuni's death, certain yoga teachings of Vedic origin became systematized in esoteric treatises, called Tantras (it is sometimes claimed that they are the Fifth Veda) and the Tantric influences of these yoga cults brought about the creation of female wisdom principles, or prajnas, for each of the already numerous demons and divinities. Avaloldta, for example, was given a female counterpart called Tara; as a merciful savior, Tara became so popular that, in certain lands. She tended to displace Him. Kuan Yin, as Avalokita is known in China, is distinctly a female presence, while the Japanese Kannon is given neither sex, or both. By the sixth century a.d., Tantric worship of female energies was dominant in both Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism, and it was this Tantric form of Buddhism that was carried north into Tibet

  The histories relate that an extraordinary naljorpa named Padma Sambhava, or Lotus-Born, established Buddhism in Tibet in the eighth century. Yogis from northwest India—Kashmir, Gilgit, and Ladakh—had carried certain teachings to western Tibet before this time, but Padma Sambhava, by discrediting the old B'on religion, established Buddhism on a firm basis and introduced the occult yogic Tantras (corresponding to kundalini yoga), some of which, tradition says, originated in the lost realm of Shambala, "in the north." (Padma Sambhava himself is supposed to have come originally from the "north country" of Urgyan, or Udyana, which is identified sometimes with Shambala but more often with a region north and west of the Indus River in what is now Afghanistan.) He is also credited with compiling the Bardo Thodol, or "Book of the Dead," as well as with founding Nyingma, the "Old Sect" of Tibetan Buddhism, which later developed the forms of Tantric practice that in Western eye seemed decadent and orgiastic. Despite his persecution of B'on sorcerers, Padma Sambhava, in the Buddhist tradition of absorbing the local religions, seems to have tolerated the inclusion of much B'on magic in Nyingma, including the grim chöd rites from the pre-Buddhist Tibetan manuscripts known as "Heart-Drops from the Great Space."14 The chöd rites may well be much older than B'on itself, deriving from archaic practices of sacrifice and exorcism. And the supreme Buddha figure of Nyingma, known as Samantabhadra, derives from an ancient deity who is probably close kin to such eminent sky gods as Zeus, Jupiter, and the Dyans-Rta of the Aryans, all of whom, it is supposed, had a common ancestor in the cultures of Central Asia.

  In Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, only a few Bodhisattvas and the historical Buddha, Sakyamuni, are commonly portrayed, and the Ch'an or Zen sect in particular has cut away most iconography, in keeping with its spare, clear, simple style; in its efforts to avoid religiosity, to encourage free-thinking and doubt, Zen makes bold use of contradictions, humor, and irreverence, applauding the monk who burned up the wood altar Buddha to keep warm. Tibetan Buddhism, on the other hand, having incorporated the Hindu pantheon as well as B'on, must pay homage to a multitude of Buddha aspects and manifestations, with varying orders of precedence and emphasis according to the sect. In such remote corners of the Himalaya as Tichu-Rong, the people still favor the Nyingma with its vestiges of B'on; here the B'on sky divinity who became king on earth lends his celestial colors of sky-blue and snow-white to Buddhist prayer flags. In the Tarakot stupa, Samantabhadra and Padma Sambhava, the traditional founder of Nyingma, are given precedence over the Buddha Sakyamuni.

  The stupa is a monument, shrine, and reliquary that traditionally derives from the Buddha's tomb, but has come to symbolize existence. On a square red base (signifying earth) sits a large white dome (water) with a sort of spire (fire) crowned with a lunar crescent (air) and a solar disc (space); such structures guard the approaches to towns and villages throughout the Buddhist Himalaya. Larger stupas may enclose a room decorated with mandalas and iconographic paintings: the inner west wall of the Tarakot stupa, for example, portrays three Bodhisattvas, while on the east wall are three Buddhas. One is a Buddha of past ages (the light-giver, Dipankara), another the historical Buddha (Sakyamuni), the third the Buddha-to-come (Maitreya, who exists at present as a Bodhisattva, but will be reborn as the Buddha in a future age).

  Tarakot's Tibetan-speaking people are not Bhotes but Magars who made their way up the river valleys long ago and later adopted Buddhism; or perhaps they were refugees from the Muslim holy wars that eradicated Buddhism from India in the twelfth century. The town itself is flat-roofed, built of stone, each building a several-storied fortress topped by prayer flags. The women wear the brass earrings of the valley peoples as well as the striped blankets of the hills, and the men, too
, lack a definitive costume, though the poorest tend to dress like Tibetan herdsmen while the headman, he whom we met in the mountains north of Yamarkhar, attires himself like a Hindu of the towns.

  Dawa and the sick Tamangs await us at the headman's house, which except in size is typical of Tarakol. The ground floor is a stable for goats, cattle, and sheep, and the only access to the floors above is by a narrow steep log ladder from the stable yard, the top of which is guarded by a grim dog on a chain. The stable roof is the clay floor of the next story, which is occupied by most of the human inhabitants as well as goat kids, lambs, and chickens. The chicks run free, peeping among brass canisters and water urns and stacks of firewood; at night, they are kept beneath overturned wicker baskets, used by day for carrying dry cargo on the human back. The house entrances are holes in the wall well above floor level (much like those in the old Anasazi dwellings at Mesa Verde and other locations in the American Southwest), and the wall itself is decorated by big round white spots; irregular wood windows let a small amount of light into the outer room, but the inner chambers are entirely dark. Animal heads are carved at the ends of the eave poles, from which hang sheepskins, calabashes, drying meat.

  From the terrace on the stable roof, another ladder mounts to the second story, where hens and hen dung are discouraged; here, warm piles of buckwheat, barley, maize, peas, hemp, and millet are spread out to dry on straw mats or homespun blankets, and one man, scattering the tree sparrows, piles big yellow pumpkin squashes in a comer. In the fall days before the snows, on all the roofs of Tarakot, people are turning winter provender toward the sun, baling up hay for their animals, and stacking brushwood for the winter's fuel. Once the buckwheat is winnowed, the chaff is stacked up with the hay for winter fodder. To one side is a great wood pot of fermented barley, used in the brewing of the local beer, called chang; the dregs will be given to the cattle, for nothing in this old economy is wasted.

  A sheepish Dawa, eyes still swollen, gives us tea when we arrive, and the Tamangs jump up from the mats where they were sleeping. Pirim (Pirimbahadur Lama; "Lama" is their own word for "Tamang") runs to my pack unasked and spreads out to dry the sleeping bag that was dried thoroughly this morning on the mountain: I thank him warmly. He is happy to see us, and delighted that I call him "Lama" with mock reverence, as if he were my guru. The rest of the Tamangs hover about, half-blind, in eagerness to be of service. In late afternoon, the sherpas turn up with Bimbahadur, who salutes the sahibs in old regimental style and goes immediately to his rest.

  Tarakot is in twilight shadow by midafternoon, while the mountainside across the Bheri, facing south, lies in full sunshine. In a strong dusk, the women gather up the grain in homespun sacks to store inside. Now the snow peaks take on color, and whistling boys bring sheep and goats from the high pastures. A rooster and a barking dog, the sting of sticks on the hard flanks of the cattle, the cry of the village termagant, unceasing, is the voice of autumn. twilight in every peasant village across time. But Tarakot is the capital of Tichu-Rong, and from the police house comes flat tin music from a small radio with weak batteries, the first such noise we have heard since late September. "A note of the twentieth century in the seventeenth," GS sighs, as sorry as myself that we have heard it.

  Toward seven, the radio goes dead and the din of the village ceases. We lie down in the open, on the roof. On this long trek, to limit weight, precious kerosine and flashlight batteries must be conserved, and so the nights are long: like the local people, we go to bed at dark and rise at dawn.

  For a time I watch the coming of the night. A bat chitters and stars loom, and somewhere on the far side of this earth, the sun is burning. Soon Mars appears over the dark split in the northern mountains where the Tarap River comes down from the Land of Dolpo, and in the snug warmth of my sleeping bag, I float under the round bowl of the heavens. Above is the glistening galaxy of childhood, now hidden in the Western world by air pollution and the glare of artificial light; for my children s children, the power, peace, and healing of the night will be obliterated.

  Every little while I wake and watch the spiral of the heavens. Orion rises, and the Pleiades. Shooting stars arc in the shimmering void of the black universe, and toward four the sky is parted by a satellite, mercifully silent, like a probe from another world, a distant century.

  A horse screams.

  The moon is up over Tibet, and in the southern mountains, over Jang, the planet Mars is disappearing. How much dignity the moon has lost, now that man has left his disrespectful litter, his cute golf balls! But the moon retains its mystery for the dogs of Tichu-Rong, which howl in awe at its first appearance, and set one another off the whole night through; while its fellows rest, the dog next door harangues the cosmos for an hour. The mastiffs sleep much of the day and are let loose at night to deal with wolves and robbers; in the absence of such, they will make do with strangers. Not caring to venture out into the streets when such brutes are abroad, I follow the custom of the town, standing on the roof edge and urinating into the mud street, in daybreak light.

  OCTOBER 19

  At sunrise, in our sleeping bags, we are served oatmeal by the gold-toothed Phu-Tsering, and from one of the friends that Tukten makes everywhere he goes, I buy a blanket of striped homespun, multicolored, strong. Meanwhile Jang-bu has conscripted seven porters and so, this morning, we depart the fabled Dzong.

  Bimbahadur will not go width us. Standing at attention, tears in his eyes, the old gurkha salutes us, crying, "Sahib!" New white sneakers and white ski socks, presented to him by GS, and pulled up high on his short rootlike legs, give Bimbahadur a peculiar air of misplaced ceremony, but above the knees, he wears his usual arrangement of brown rags and gritty blankets. Now he turns away and sets off up the mountainside, leaning heavily upon his stave, bound south over the blue heights of Jang La and across the snows to his cave on the Seng River, thence to Yamarkhar and Dhorpatan, and east to the Kali Gandaki.

  The police offcial at Tarakot, having given us bored, pompous audience, has referred us to his superior at Dunahi, not having the authority, it seems, to make things hot for us himself. We leave before he thinks of something, taking the path that drops straight down through garden terraces to the Bheri. In the terraces are four kinds of millet-like grains, not quite familiar, such as might have been grown millennia ago by the people of the Middle East who are thought to have first domesticated the wild cereals. Squash and beans are plentiful, and in my need to supplement our dead white diet, I pick and eat raw purple kidney beans all the way downhill.

  Near the river, a troupe of Himalayan langurs has invaded a garden of red millet. The monkeys are forty-one in all, including six infants that are carried, and they are knocking down in play the plants they are not eating. Gleeful, Tukten yells, "Ho, Diddi!" ("Hey, Sister!") and a woman comes running from the garden, slinging stones. Curl-tailed, the langurs move into the rocks, in no great hurry, and there turn to observe man at their leisure. They are big handsome silver-brown creatures, one of the most beautiful of primates, with frosted faces and an expression so entirely detached as to seem disdainful—a very suitable expression, at least in the lead male, which upon taking control of a band customarily sets about the systematic killing of its infants, thereby bringing the females quickly into estrus, and preparing them for the perpetuation of his genes.

  The langur is sacred to all Hindus as the manifestation of the monkey god Hanuman, and is also the beast most commonly brought forth to account for footprints of the "abominable snowman," although bears, snow leopards, great-footed birds, and melting snow have their supporters. In the half-century since big, upright creatures, leaving hundreds of tracks, were seen in a high snowfield on the north side of Mount Everest by a band of British mountaineers, the ye-teh, or yeti, has met with a storm of disapproval from upset scientists around the world. But as with the sasquatch of the vast rain forests of the Pacific Northwest, the case against the existence of the yeti—entirely speculative, and necessarily based on assumptio
ns of foolishness or mendacity in many observers of good reputation—is even less "scientific" than the evidence that it exists. Photographs and casts of the yeti footprint are consistent—a very odd, broad primate foot—and so are the sight records, most of which come from the populous Sherpa country of eastern Nepal.

  The yeti is described most often as a hairy, reddish-brown creature with a ridged crown that gives it a pointed-head appearance; in size, despite the outsized foot (entirely unlike the long foot of a bear, in which the toes are more or less symmetrical), it has been likened to an adolescent boy, though much larger individuals have been reported. There are no brown bears (Ursos arctos) on the south side of the Himalaya, where both black bear and langur are well known and unmistakable. Bears hibernate in winter, when yetis are most often seen (in lean times, they appear to scavenge near monasteries and villages), and most yeti tracks are much too large to be made by monkeys, even in melting snow. Langurs are rarely seen in snow, or yetis either, if it comes to that: while the yeti may cross the snows on foraging excursions to higher elevations or into the next valley, its primary habitat must be the cloud forest of the myriad deep Himalayan canyons, which are exceptionally inhospitable to man. From a biologist's point of view, in fact, most of the Himalayan region is still terra incognita. As GS says, almost nothing is known of the natural history of the snow leopard, and we are walking a long way indeed to find out some basic information about the relatively accessible Himalayan bharal.

  One evening last month in Kathmandu, a young biologist in charge of a field project in the Arun Valley of eastern Nepal set down on our dinner table a big primate footprint in white plaster; this cast had been made in the snow outside his tent six months before.15 The tracks had led down across steep snow-fields into valley forest; he and his colleagues were not able to follow. Plainly the creature being spoken of was the "abominable snowman," and I waited for GS to express skepticism. But he merely nodded, picking up the cast with care, turning it over, and setting it down again, his face frowning and intent; what interested him most, he said at last, was the similarity of this yeti print to that of the mountain gorilla. And later he told me that he was not being polite, that there was no doubt in his mind that a creature not yet scientifically described had made this print. Despite the scoffing of his peers, GS has believed in the existence of this creature ever since the mountaineer Eric Shipton took the first clear photographs of yeti prints on Everest, in 1951. "At least ninety-five percent of the yeti material is nonsense," GS said, "But I'm convinced, on the basis of the Shipton photographs and some other evidence, that an animal unknown to science occurs here." (He still has doubts about the sasquatch, the existence of which has been accepted by no less an authority on primates than Dr. John Napier of the University of London; Napier, on the other hand, has no faith in the yeti, although he is disturbed by Shiptons photographs.16) A theory that the yeti is a relic species of early man, driven long ago into dense forests by the surge of Homo sapiens that presumably eliminated more primitive hominids, is not helped by its strange, bestial foot, which would seem to place it closer to a subhominid such as Gigantopithecus or even to the apes; yet the hundreds of photographs and casts of sasquatch tracks show a very large, crude humanoid footprint with the big toe close to all the rest, not separate as in all other known primates—a footprint such as might have been made by a large Australopithecine species of early man. (This raises the interesting possibility that the sasquatch is not "unknown to science" but, like the coelacanth, was prematurely classified "extinct.")