No reply from George.
We trekked like this for about three days. All the time we were covering the ground that the proposed road would pass through when they built it, something I often pointed out to George, but he appeared unmoved by the prospect. In fact it seemed to me he was getting to think a road there wouldn’t be a bad idea.
On the fourth morning he said “Come on, Freds, where is this place?”
“We’re almost there. Couple days. But first we have to go cross-country around Chhule.”
“What? Why?”
“That’s where the Nepali Army outpost is. This is as far north as trekkers are allowed to go, you know, it’s that zone they agreed on with the Chinese? The detrekkerized zone, twenty kilometers or some such.”
“Ah. They’re serious about that, aren’t they.”
“You bet. They’ve got a whole battalion based in Chhule, a hundred soldiers or so, all to keep anyone but locals from going any further north.”
“But what about this road you’re worried about?”
“They plan to build it right to Chhule. That’s close enough to Shambhala that it would be fatal to the valley.”
“Good.”
“What?”
“I mean, good that we’re close.”
“Yeah, we’re almost there.”
Which was almost true. The fact was, leaving the trail to bypass Chhule meant going cross-country, and there is nothing harder than hiking cross-country in the forests of the Himal. Wet, vertical, densely covered with leech-infested foliage—it’s horrible hard work, in country usually left to the yetis, who make good use of it. But there was a kind of ledge high above the town that could be used as a path if you could find it—people from Shambhala had used it since the time Chhule was founded, but they did their best to leave no trace of their passing, so it was tough locating it in the cloud mist. Late in the afternoon we hacked our way to it, and we even found a nearly horizontal spot for our night’s camp.
George, however, could not be convinced either that this was a viable campsite, or that we were on the path to Shambhala.
“What did you think?” says I. “Did you think it was gonna be easy to get to Shambhala? There ain’t gonna be no superhighways to it. In fact we’ve seen the last of the trail. The whole rest of the way is cross-country.”
This was true, but once past Chhule we could descend back onto the valley floor. Once there we hiked immediately into the shelter of an enormous rhododendron forest, one that filled a good two miles of the valley. Because the monsoon had hit so early this year the whole forest was still in bloom, every tree an explosion of rich pink or white or lavender flowers, each flower big and bright and water-jeweled. We walked under a roof of millions of these wonders, with mist trailing between the gnarled black branches, and it was so strange and exquisite that even George shut up, and hiked along with his mouth hanging open.
Beyond the rhododendron forest we got into the weird tropical-arctic scrub that covers Himalayan valleys in the zone between about fourteen and seventeen thousand feet. This is God’s own country if you ask me, mountain meadows covered with heather, spiky mosses, lichen, little shrubs, and alpine and tundra flowers. The valley here was clearly U-shaped, a glacial thing with steep granite walls, and we crawled up it like ants at the bottom of an empty swimming pool. The valley floor had silvery watertracks snaking all over it, and as we hiked beside these glacial streams we could hear rocks clunking along the bottom, rerouting the streams even as we watched. And towering over the valley to each side were the snowy vertical peaks of the Himal crest, although on that trek we never saw them much because of the clouds.
We were nearing the border between Nepal and Tibet. The general trend of the range is east to west, but there are innumerable spur ranges, all twisted and contorted as you’d only expect when one continent is crashing under another at high speed. The political border tries to follow the crest of the range, but in some areas there’s a knot of crossing ridges and it isn’t at all clear what the “crest” is. In those areas the border gets kinky, and it’s right in one of those kinks, where twenty-thousand-foot ridges jam into each other and push some peaks to twenty-five, that the high valley of Shambhala is located.
Still some miles to the south of this, George and I came to a Y-split in our valley, offering routes to west and north. The right fork was a long gradual rise to a pass that had served for centuries as a major trading route between Nepal and Tibet. It was this pass, Nangpa La, that explained the Army post in Chhule—their job was to shut it down.
The left fork was blocked by a mean wall, which we climbed, and above that was a long high skinny valley, with a glacier still filling its bottom. We followed the glacier up into a horseshoe ring of spiky peaks. This horseshoe wall was Shambhala’s final protection from accidental visitors, and as we hiked to the head of the glacier, looking down at the rubble and melt ponds and blue seracs, and then up at the great curving wall of shattered stone, George said “Hell, Freds, you sure you aren’t lost?”
The truth was this was just the spot where I always did get lost. I knew which low spot in the horseshoe ring was our pass, but crossing the glacier and snowfields to get to its bottom was no easy thing, especially when clouds swept in and filled the cirque with cottonball fog. But eventually I got us there, using an occasional line of yeti prints to guide me. These always take the cleanest line across any broken country, but those yetis will leap over crevasses that humans can only stare at shivering, so following their tracks can be unreliable.
At the foot of the wall we had to make camp, in a devil’s golf course rock garden. And next morning it was snowing hard, miserable conditions for a nineteen-thousand-foot pass, but there was no advantage to waiting as it might snow for the next two months, so we put on crampons and started up. Soon we were so high there wasn’t even any lichen. Every once in a while we saw prints in the snow, of people, and yetis, and snow leopards, and higher yet there were some unobtrusive trail ducks. And midafternoon, to George’s surprise, the clouds blew away. You see the Nepal side of the crest catches the monsoon and gets a few hundred inches of rain a year, but just twenty miles north in Tibet they are in total rain shadow desert and get about zero. So on the crest itself there are all kinds of micro-environments where the amount of rain is somewhere between the extremes, and much more livable than either. Shambhala’s valley had just about the best climate possible for the area, one reason it was located there in the first place I’m sure.
Anyway we had climbed into the clear, in brilliant cold windy sunshine above a cloud ocean, shadows black as night and each rock sticking out of the wind-slabbed snow just as distinct as if you were holding a microscope to it. We were no more than five hundred feet below our saddle, and now a faint line of footprints was clear, individual prints displaying huge big toes. “Look,” I said. “Yeti prints.”
“Come on, Freds. I don’t believe in that stuff.”
“George, you yourself saved a yeti in Kathmandu! You dressed him! You introduced him to Jimmy Carter! You gave him your Dodgers cap!”
“Yeah, yeah.” He appeared to disbelieve that particular memory. “But what would a yeti be doing up here?”
“What would a human be doing up here hiking barefoot?”
No reply from George.
We followed the footprints, which disdained switchbacks and headed straight for the pass. The air was thin indeed and it took a while to slog up the last section, but there in the pass was a line of chortens and mani walls and prayer flags strung between poles all ripped to rags by the constant wind, and it was a sight to lift you right up to it, it made the last section like an escalator.
We could only stand to stay in the pass a few minutes, as the wind was brutal. Around us all the ridges banged together, cutting off our view of Tibet to the north, and in fact restricting our views in every direction. High on the wind came a brief squeal, and I pointed out to George what looked like a patch of moving snow. A snow leopard, helping to
guard the sacred valley. But George didn’t believe his sight any more than his memory.
Then we started our descent into a narrow valley, a fairly high one although since we had an airplane’s view it didn’t seem high at that moment. On the valley floor was the usual gravel spill of meandering streams, cutting through tiny bits of green and yellow terracing. Above those were abandoned yak herders’ huts, some bare brown potato fields, some stone-walled pastures, and a few chortens. Farther downvalley, perched on an ancient butt moraine, was a gathering of stone buildings, all the slate roofs smoking in the midday sun. The buildings were surrounded by nomads’ tents. In short, it was a completely ordinary Himalayan mountain village, with nothing to distinguish it except perhaps what looked like the ruins of an old monastery, built into a rocky ridge of the valley’s side wall in dzong fortress style.
Feeling my heart flapping happily with the prayer flags behind us, I extended a hand. “There it is,” says I to George. “There’s Shambhala, there’s the palace of Kalapa, there’s the Lotus Kingdom! Yahoo!”
He gave me a long, long stare.
* * *
Well, I suppose he was expecting the Disneyland castle or a bunch of crystal houses floating ten feet off the ground, but that ain’t the way it is. There was nothing to be done but let him get used to it, so I took off down the trail and he followed.
Before long Colonel John jumped us from behind some boulders, screaming “Halt!” at the top of his lungs. George like to died he was so startled.
Standing there before us was a compact wiry Westerner with a wizened lopsided face, wearing camouflage combat fatigues and toting a big old machine gun which he had pointed straight at us.
“It’s okay!” I said to both of them. “It’s me, Colonel. Me and a good friend.”
He stared at us with birdlike intensity. His face was strange, wrinkled like the face of an old monk who had spent too many years at high altitude in the sun—or, given the fatigues, as if he had been fighting a mountain war for twenty or thirty years. A big scarred crease in the left side of his head reinforced the latter notion, as did the 1950s military-style butch haircut. But then the turquoise and coral necklaces and charm boxes hanging over his fatigues brought back the monk image, as did his eyes, which had a little Asian in them. All in all it was as if an old Tibetan monk and a retired Marine drill sergeant had been melted together into a single body. Which was more or less the case.
“George,” says I carefully, “this is Colonel John Harris, late of the CIA and the U.S. Marine Corps. He helps valley security these days.”
“I am valley security,” the colonel snapped in a high Midwestern twang.
“Okay, well, this is George Fergusson, Colonel. He’s here to help us with the problem of that road extension to Chhule.”
“Prove it,” the colonel snapped.
“Well,” I says, at a loss. Then I switched to Tibetan, speaking it slowly and clearly, as the colonel is one of the few people on earth to speak Tibetan worse than I. I chanted a brief prayer to the Köngchog Sum, the Three Precious Ones. “Sannggyela kyabsu chio,” I said, meaning “I seek refuge in the Buddha.”
“Ah!” the colonel said, and let his gun hang from its shoulder strap. He put his hands together and gave us a novice monk’s bow. “Honored by your presence,” he said in Tibetan. “Gendunla kyabsu chio,” which means, “I take refuge in the monkhood.” Which was very true for John.
“We’re off to the valley,” I told him, sticking to Tibetan. “Are you coming down tonight?”
“Standing watch,” he said. He frowned, said in English, “Down tomorrow at oh eight hundred!”
“See you for breakfast, then,” I said, and hustled down the trail with George close on my heels.
“Who the hell is he?” George asked me when we were out of earshot.
“Well, Shambhala picks up people from all over the world, you know. If they stumble across the valley and have the right spirit for it, they stay. If they don’t have the right spirit they never even recognize it, you’d be surprised how many trekkers come over the pass by accident and just figure they’ve run across another remote village and leave.”
No reply from George.
Finally he says, “So when did this Colonel John arrive?”
“He was in the CIA when they helped the Tibetan resistance fight the Chinese, back in the sixties. You know about that?”
“No.”
“They kept it real secret. John spent a few years in Mustang with a guerrilla group. So he must have gotten here sometime in the early seventies. Now he’s a monk, and also kind of like Shambhala’s defense department.”
“Defense department,” George said.
We dropped like an avalanche to the valley floor, and got there just after sunset with our knees throbbing. I led George straight to the house of Kunga Norbu’s family, and as I walked down the narrow stone streets between the familiar three-story buildings I was breathing in the smells of milktea and smoke and wet yak wool and they went like a knife right to my memory’s heart, and I laughed and started yelling hi to the people we passed. A light snow twinkled in the air like mica chips, and I found myself dancing a spinning dance down the street, drunk with homecoming.
Kunga Norbu’s oldest sister Lhamo greeted us at their door with a big smile and brought us upstairs to the kitchen and sat us down on a broad bench against one blanketed wall and commenced feeding us. Most of the family crowded in to look at George and talk to me—Kunga Norbu’s ancient mother, his younger sisters and their families, some more distant relations they had taken in, and relations of relations until we were jammed in tight. I sat there warming my feet by the fire trying to collect my Tibetan to talk to them. Lhamo fed us a feast, tsampa and butter tea of course but also yak cheese, margam butter, a dried cream called pumar, and a kind of cheesecake they call thud, maybe for the sound it makes when it bottoms out in your stomach. All the familiar tastes and faces and the smell of the yak dung fire had me purring, and happily I tried to tell them about our trip.
George of course was silent throughout all this, and he avoided his butter tea, and ate as little of his food as he could get away with. Even that amount meant his prophylactic diet was wiped out and it seemed to me he was brooding on this, listening to his digestion and perhaps adding up in his mind the quantity of antibiotics he had brought along. He glanced around the room, at the carpets and sashes and the bowls and pots of bright dented copper and the black iron steamer and the hanging utensils and the brazier and the tall butter churns and the nyindrog boxes and the loom in the corner, and he looked tired and low, as if this wasn’t at all what he had expected. A crowded smoky little wood and brick room, I reckon he saw, and he was let down by that.
* * *
Well, I suppose Himalayan Buddhist village life isn’t the kind to reveal all its beauties right off the bat anyway, especially in the monsoon, although as I said Shambhala’s valley is protected from the worst of the weather. Still, it rained or snowed an hour or two almost every day. And ever since the Chinese invaded Tibet Shambhala has suffered from overpopulation, serving as it does as a sort of secret advance refugee camp. That’s why the big mountain nomads’ yak wool tents surrounded the village, and why all the old stone houses and Kalapa monastery were so full of people. The crowding caused problems, and things were not in great shape to impress George. Lhamo tried, putting us in the best bedroom in the house above the kitchen where it was warmest, but George kept having nightmares that the house was burning down because smoke from the kitchen stove seeped up into our room and made it smell like the house was burning down. So every morning he stumbled out of the house sleepless and exhausted, and there before him was a strangely packed mountain village, as if it was bazaar day except it wasn’t, and sick kids were howling with the flu and the monastery head doctor Dr. Choendrak wandered through the rain wringing his hands, because all the great plant and mineral medicines from Mendzekhang, the hospital monastery in Lhasa, were long since used up
.
It didn’t help George’s impression of things when Kunga Norbu came down to say hello and just stared through George in his usual style, and then assigned us to work with a crew rebuilding terrace walls, which is convict-style labor, including breaking up rocks with a sledgehammer like characters in a cartoon. A day or two of that and George was unhappy. “Goddamn, Freds, I coulda been soaking rays in Thamel and here I am breaking rocks. This isn’t Shambhala and you know it.”
I assured him it was.
“Why is it so crowded then? Every house has two or three times as many people as it should, and then there’s all these tents. The Sherpas would never live this way.”
I told him about the refugee problem. About people crossing uncrossable passes to escape the Chinese, or crawling up the impassable gorge that dropped out of the valley onto the Tibetan plateau, risking death and often finding it in hopes of getting away.
“So it’s emergency conditions,” George said, surprised.
“If you can call it that after forty years.”
That night George looked around him a little more carefully. And for the first time he noticed that there were people sick right there in the house with us. A cousin of Lhamo’s named Sindu had a baby boy who was getting weak with the runs. And this cousin Sindu was a young woman, nearly a girl, with a lot of Nepali blood in her so that her face was sharper than the Tibetans’, one of those trans-Himal faces that is so beautiful you can’t believe it’s real. And no husband to be seen. So George sat there watching her as she moved around the kitchen caring for her sick boy, and I could see him adding up his pills in his mind.
Escape From Kathmandu Page 17