The Snow leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

  In the winter canyon of the Suli, all has changed. Where banks of berries shone before, lone small red leaves still cling to the withered bushes; the green lichens on the stones have turned to gold. The moon bear's nest has been ripped down, perhaps for fuel, and the falling leaves have left exposed the ravaged canyon sides charred by man's fires.

  In the autumnal melancholy I remember France, in the years that I lived there, still in love with my first wife. One day in Paris, I met Deborah Love, whom I was to marry ten years later. And now, in different ways, those life-filled creatures are both gone. I hurry with the river.

  All my life, I have hurried down between these walls, the sun crossing high over my head, voice swept away in the din of this green flood. The river, and life going, the excruciating sun: why do I hurry?

  The sun reveals itself, pouring out of a ravine. In an icy stream, I wash away the Murwa dust, and brush my teeth, and deck my cap with a rock dove feather found along the trail. Below, the Suli Gorge is deep and dark again; at this time of the year, there must be parts of it that never see the sun.

  Toward noon, the trail climbs up out of the gorge onto the mountainside. In October, when I stared behind me at the snow peaks, this prospect struck me as one of the loveliest in all my lifetime, and I had thought to enjoy it even more on the return journey, in a slow descent into the valleys. Instead I feel driven, and my pace is urgent. Even the narrow trails no longer slow me, I am hardened to all but the worst of them. The season is turning rapidly from near winter to late autumn, and down the mountainside, fresh green bamboo appears along the river.

  On a grassy lookout high over the green torrent, I eat one of Tuktens blackish "breads," then keep on going. Probably it would be best to wait for Tukten; I cannot. I keep on going, high on all the oxygen of lower altitudes, up and down and up and down the stony path that drops to the river and climbs up the steep canyon sides and drops again. The wind cave is passed, and the upside-down falls, but the stone demon—doubtless he who lost the epic struggle with the mountain god at Bugu La and was cast down into the Suli Gad ravines—is lost in the shifting lights of the swift river. I thought I remembered just the place, but the stone is gone.

  The valley woods shelter herdsmen and their fires, and near the hut, a big corral has been set up for yaks, dogs, goats, and human beings in rough skins and pigtails. In the chill air, the dark-skinned northerners sit stripped to the waist, amidst semicircles of striped wool sacks that mark out each encampment. One gesticulates; he knows me, for he points and cries, "Shey Gompa!" I am told to stay, and so I do for an hour or more, skirting the half-wild wolf-eyed dogs as I stroll in curiosity about the camp. It is early afternoon, the sun here is already gone, and since Tukten and the others are so late, it seems sensible to remain here with the herdsmen. But I am too restless, I cannot wait here in this gorge when sun still shines on the trail along the mountain; abruptly I rise and, watched by impassive Tartar faces, set out without goodbyes toward the south.

  At the only brook on this dry mountainside is a small meadow where it is level enough to pitch a tent; surely Tukten will catch up with me before I reach this place, in midafternoon. But he does not, and anyway, the meadow swarms with men and beasts; I drink cold water from the brook and hurry on. Now I am certain that Tukten is not coming, and disturbed about what might have happened—was Dawa too sick to travel after all? Did Chiring Lamo fall into the fire? Has Tukten borne out all the warnings of his doubtful character, and made off to India with my gear? I carry my notes, binoculars, and sleeping bag, with a change of clothes; he is welcome to the rest.

  Still, it grows late, and I have neither food nor fuel, and there is no flat place for a fire, except this narrow path along steep mountainside, exposed to wind. I must go to Rohagaon, although I cannot reach it before dark. Yesterday, in the spirit of discarding, I threw away my cache of marijuana; today I want it for the first time since I gathered it at Yamarkhar, for I am worn out after ten hours on the steep sides of the Suli Gad, and have no heart for Rohagaon's denizens and dogs. And this thought of Cannabis has scarcely occurred when a small withered specimen turns up, just off the trail I chew up a mouthful on the spot, and thus fortified, march ahead. An hour later, when the cairn to Masta looms on the comer of the mountain, I am all set for this dog-ridden hole, thumping the path with my new spruce stave, not to be trifled with by man or beast.

  The dogs are still chained, as it turns out, but the school hut where I hoped to stay is already occupied by a wool trader who displays small enthusiasm for my company. On the roofs above, the somber townsmen gather. The children of Rohagaon now fall silent, and the dogs: all look down from the walls above, as if on the point of carrying out some dreadful judgment. Who is this tall, outlandish figure, come in out of the darkness without porters? For in the dark, they do not know me from the month before. "Aloo, aloo!" I cry, making weird hunger signals, as if this might identify me with mankind, and after a while they understand that I am trying to say, "Potatoes!" There are no aloo, it appears, only small anda laid by the gaunt chickens, which a filthy man of suppurating eye cooks for me in a skillet that his woman has wiped first on her black rags. I think of the kind Japanese doctor and his earnest warnings about boiling all food and drink, no matter what, and hope that by now I have absorbed suffcient germs to fight off everything. Another inhabitant, luring me to his low chamber, persuades me to buy a brass cup of his alcohol, which looks and smells like a pink gasoline; this stuff, I think, might disinfect the eggs. My host is teacher at the school: he calls me "my dear brother"—a Hindu habit he has picked up in the lowlands—and tries out other English, too, which I praise lavishly in a successful effort to usurp his bed. Safe from the dogs and the night cold, my belly placated by anda, Cannabis, and pink lightning, I lie back in near-spiritual bliss: why in hell do I work so hard at meditation? Someone once said that God offers man the choice between repose and truth: he cannot have both. I have scarcely decided on a lifetime of repose when the dogs set up a terrific row, and everyone rushes forth into the night.

  The faithful Tukten has arrived in the pitch-dark, along trails that I don't care for much even in daylight. Dawa and the rest, says he, will no doubt turn up shortly, as indeed they do, with Chiring Lamo crying. While arranging for roof, firewood, and water, Tukten makes a place for me at the family hearth of Infected Eye, where I witness cooking rites so simple and certain in their movements that I sit marveling upon my goat skin, scarcely breathing. The cooking is done by the woman in black rags while Infected Eye lies glowering against the wall; the slow deft handling of burning twigs as tsampa and dried pumpkin squash are cooked on a brazier, the breadmaking, the murmuring, the love and food extended to the children without waste words or motion, the tenderness toward the sick husband—all has the pace and dignity of sacrament. Earlier, to impress his fellow villagers, Infected Eye had shouted senselessly at his woman, hurling my rupee note into her face; here by his hearth, where no one can be fooled, he is soft-spoken, humble, full of pain, and this good woman and his children tuck him up against the earthen wall in blankets, laying the infant in beside him. Under the black rags, filth, and brassy earrings of the valleys, she is young: I had thought her a crone. Now she eats the children's leavings—and that only—and sighs and yawns and spreads herself a mat beside her husband. Remarkably, all this takes place as if my own big unfamiliar presence were not there, though I sit here like a Buddha by the hearth. For some time, I have been utterly still, and the children look right through me; it is very strange. Perhaps I have grown invisible at last.

  NOVEMBER 24

  In the entrance of the dwelling of Infected Eye, I slept last night on a soft bed of dust a half-inch deep. The mad dog of Rohagaon, chained outside, barked all night in vain, for I was too tired to be bothered by his uproar. Only in the early night, when he first woke me, did I go out and threaten him with my stick. This incensed him to the gargling point; he fairly tore his chain out of the wall. Carried away by drunkenness and mi
rth, I pissed on him, thereby wreaking my revenge for that nightmarish October night as well as this one. And on the wings of this cowardly act, perpetrated by the light of a darkling moon, I went in the greatest peace and satisfaction to my rest.

  At dawn, the family's sighed complaints came through the earthen wall, and then the father hobbled out into the light to hawk and piss and spit into the daybreak. Soon his woman went off around the mountain to fetch water, and perhaps squat at the path edge, gazing south at the dawn snow peaks on the far side of the Bheri, and letting who knows what manner of lorn thought pass through her head.

  Even before sunrise, the air feels warmer; I can scarcely see my breath in the mountain air. A flight of rock doves, leaving its roost in a ravine below Rohagaon, opens out in the morning sun over the valley in a burst of blue-silver wings.

  I pass the rock where the Tamangs cracked small walnuts, then the wild walnut wood, now stark and bare. The yellow is gone and the rich humus smell; and the brook that trickles through the wood, muted a month ago by heavy leaf fall, is now insistent, hastening away down the steep mountain to the Suli. There is only a silent company of gray trunks, dulled mosses, stumps, and straying leaves, and the whispering small birds of winter. But farther down the valley, the abandoned village, so empty-eyed and still in early autumn, has been brought to life by voices of man, dog, and rooster, for its slopes are winter pasture now for the yak herds from the north.

  From the village, a southward path quits the main trail, descending through rocks and shining olives to a bridge on the green river. The portals of the bridge are carved in grotesque figures, yellow and red. Awaiting the others, I stand on the hot planks in the noon sun, overtaken by a vague despair. In this river runs the Kang La stream, by way of Phoksumdo River and the lake, and also the torrent down from Bugu La, and the branch that falls from the B'on village at Pung-mo; the Suli carries turquoise from Phoksumdo, and crystals of diamond blue down from Kang La.

  Another hour passes; no one comes. Beside myself, I go on across the bridge and climb the bluff. A half mile below, the jade water of the snow peaks disappears into the gray roil of the Bheri River, which will bear it southward into lowland muds.

  The track follows the Bheri westward in a long, gradual climb to the horizon, arriving at a village in a forest. In the cedars of Roman, a fitful wind whips the mean rags on the shrines, and phallic spouts jut from red effigies at the village fountains, and west of the village stand wild cairns and tall red poles. From fields below, a troupe of curl-tailed monkey demons gazes upward, heads afire in the dying light. Then the sun is gone behind the mountains.

  I have a headache, and feel very strange. The whole day has been muddied by a raging in my head caused by the tardiness of my companions, who were two hours behind me at the bridge—an echo of that grotesque rage at Murwa, where for want of unfrozen air in which to bathe, I vilified the sun that dodged my tent. I seem to have lost all resilience, not to mention sense of humor—can this be dread of the return to lowland life?

  Walking along the Bheri hills this afternoon, I remembered how careful one must be not to talk too much, or move abruptly, after a silent week of Zen retreat, and also the precarious coming down from highs on the hallucinogens; it is crucial to emerge gradually from such a chrysalis, drying new wings in the sun's quiet, like a butterfly, to avoid a sudden tearing of the spirit Certainly this has been a silent time, and a hallucinatory inner journey, too, and now there is this sudden loss of altitude. Whatever the reason, I am coming down too fast—too fast for what? And if I am coming down too fast, why do I hurry? Far from celebrating my great journey, I feel mutilated, murderous: I am in a fury of dark energies, with no control at all on my short temper.

  Thus, when a Hindu of Roman, knocking small children aside, pushes his scabby head into my tent and glares about in stupid incredulity, yelling inchoate questions at my face out of a bad mouth with a rotting lip, I lunge at him and shove him bodily out of my sight, lashing the tent flap and yelling incomprehensibly myself: I do not have the medicine he needs, and anyway there is no cure for him, no cure for me. How can he know, poor stinking bastard, that it is not his offensiveness that offends me, the pus and the bad breath of him—no, it is his very flesh, no different from my own. In his damnable need, he returns me to our common plight, this pit of longing into which, having failed in my poor leap, I sink again.

  ''Expect nothing," Eido Roshi had warned me on the day I left. And I had meant to go lightly into the light and silence of the Himalaya, without ambition of attainment. Now I am spent. The path I followed breathlessly has faded among stones; in spiritual ambition, I have neglected my children and done myself harm, and there is no way back. Nor has anything changed; I am still beset by the same old lusts and ego and emotions, the endless nagging details and irritations—that aching gap between what I know and what I am. I have lost the flow of things and gone awry, sticking out from the unwinding spiral of my life like a bent spring. For all the exhilaration, splendor, and ''success" of the journey to the Crystal Mountain, a great chance has been missed and I have failed. I will perform the motions of parenthood, my work, my friendships, my Zen practice, but all hopes, acts, and travels have been blighted. I look forward to nothing.

  NOVEMBER 25

  Today Karma and his family will go as far as Tibrikot, where they will turn down the Bheri trade routes toward the south. In the soft mist of the foothills, Karma is singing; last night, looking out across the Bheri Valley from this roof, he played his lute for the first time since the dancing at Saldang. At sunrise, I bid goodbye to this dashing minstrel, and to Tende where she lies with Chiring Lamo, lazing naked in warm sheepskins, baring herself in a charming way to wave.

  At Raka it was dead of winter, at Murwa near winter, in Rohagaon the deep autumn; in the valley that leads down to Tibrikot, the walnut trees are still in leaf, and green ferns grow among the copper ones along the watercourses, and I meet a hoopoe; swallows and butterflies flit through the warm air. And so I travel against time, in the weary light of dying summer.

  Not having to wait for Karma and his family, the sherpas catch me before I get to Tibrikot, which lies on the east-west route between Tarakot and Jumla and is by repute the great trade center of this region. A large red Hindu temple stands on a knoll over the river, for Brahmins and Chetris have come up the Bheri River to this mighty bend among the mountains, and two small Hindu dukhan that adjoin each other are the first shops I have seen since leaving Pokhara. We obtain a few crucial supplies—salt, sugar, matches, soap—but since neither shop has candles, kerosene, or flashlight batteries, our evenings will continue to be lightless. Rice and flour are lacking, too, so that we must continue to subsist on lentils, scavenging aloo or anda where we may. There is so little to be had in Tibrikot that we are done with the great trade center in a few minutes, taking the westward route on a long gradual ascent up the Balansuro River, under the snow peaks. Between here and Jumla, we must cross two passes, but both are low, so Tukten says, and we expect no trouble. Northward, there is a trail over the peaks to the B'on village of Pung-mo, above Phoksumdo, but this has been closed for winter by the snows.

  Is today Thanksgiving?

  Remembering the depression of my first descent from Tarakot into the Bheri Canyon, I have convinced myself that sudden loss of altitude is the main clue to my veering moods. A change is taking place, some painful growth, as in a snake during the shedding of its skin—dull, irritable, without appetite, dragging about the stale shreds of a former life, near-blinded by the old dead scale on the new eye. It is difficult to adjust because I do not know who is adjusting; I am no longer that old person and not yet the new.

  Already the not-looking-forward, the without-hope-ness takes on a subtle attraction, as if I had glimpsed the secret of these mountains, still half-understood. With the past evaporated, the future pointless, and all expectation worn away, I begin to experience that now that is spoken of by the great teachers.

  To the repentant th
ief upon the cross, the soft Jesus of the modern Bible holds out hope of Heaven: "Today thou art with me in Paradise." But in older translations, as Soen Roshi points out, there is no "today,'' no suggestion of the future. In the Russian translation, for example, the meaning is "right here now." Thus, Jesus declares, "You are in Paradise right now"—how much more vital! There is no hope anywhere but in this moment, in the karmic terms laid down by one's own life. This very day is an aspect of nirvana, which is not different from samsara but, rather, a subtle alchemy, the transformation of dark mud into the pure, white blossom of the lotus.

  "Of course I enjoy this life! It's wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!"

  And perhaps this is what Tukten knows—that the journey to Dolpo, step by step and day by day, is the Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus, the Tao, the Way, the Path, but no more so than small events of days at home. The teaching offered us by Lama Tupjuk, with the snow leopard watching from the rocks and the Crystal Mountain flying on the sky, was not, as I had thought that day, the enlightened wisdom of one man but a splendid utterance of the divine in all mankind.

  We climb onward, toward the sky, and with every step my spirits rise. As I walk along, my stave striking the ground, I leave the tragic sense of things behind; I begin to smile, infused with a sense of my own foolishness, with an acceptance of the failures of this journey as well as of its wonders, acceptance of all that I might meet upon my path. I know that this transcendence will be fleeting, but while it lasts, I spring along the path as if set free; so light do I feel that I might be back in the celestial snows.

  This clear and silent light of the Himalaya is intensified by the lack of smoke and noise. The myriad high peaks, piercing the atmosphere, let pass a light of heaven—the light on stones that makes them ring, the sun roaring and the silverness that flows in lichens and the wings of crows, the silverness in the round tinkle of a pony's bell, and in the scent of snows.