Descent

by Roland Smith

  “If it were as simple as going to it, yes, but it is not a place you find. It is a place that allows you to find it.”

  “Like summiting a mountain.”

  “Like summiting anything.”

  “Like you closing the cleft in the rock at the hot springs?”

  “I did not close the cleft.”

  “Your friends?” I nodded at the two sleeping monks.

  Zopa shook his head. “Earthquake.”

  “But who caused the earthquake?”

  “You mean what caused the earthquake.”

  “Why is it so difficult to get a straight answer out of you?”

  Zopa smiled. “Because there are no straight answers, which I am sure you believe is yet another crooked answer from me.”

  That’s exactly what I thought.

  “It would be best to stop thinking. There is little point to it out here.”

  “You might as well ask me to stop breathing,” I said. “You can’t stop your thoughts.”

  Zopa shrugged. “Answers about the future are, at best, guesses. Who knows what lies ahead? Am I being . . . What is that word? Obtuse?”

  “Probably not, because that means thick-headed. But you are being abstruse, which means you are difficult to understand. I’m not comfortable bringing other people into our problems.”

  “You are more concerned about other people than you are about yourself,” Zopa said. “Good karma.”

  “I’m plenty concerned about myself,” I said. “But I’m also worried that these monks might get hurt because of us. Maybe Josh and I should turn ourselves in or take off and try for the border on our own.”

  “You are free to do what you like, but there are things that you may have neglected to consider. One is my obligation to your father. I asked him to climb Hkakabo Razi with you. He is in Tibet because of me. I couldn’t very well lead him to the lion’s den and abandon him. The other thing you should know is that Sergeant Shek is now after me. Yama, and probably many others, have told him that you and your father are traveling with a monk. Shek knows of your father’s and my relationship. I too am wanted by the Chinese. I suspect their desire for me is greater than it is for your father. You and your father taking off, as you put it, would only divide their pursuit. It would not stop them from following me to the monastery.”

  “If that’s the case, maybe we should all head to the nearest border. Let these two monks go home.”

  “Which brings me back to my original point. I doubt Shek and his men will be allowed into Pemako. I believe we are going to a place they cannot enter, but this can never be known with certainty.”

  * * *

  We continued on—up and down, up and down—for days with the sound of the helicopter soaring above the canopy like a lone vulture. We didn’t talk much. We didn’t have the breath. At night we barely had the strength to shovel rice into our mouths with chopsticks. To make it easier for myself, I started using Ethan’s spoon. I didn’t think he’d mind.

  My compass had started acting strangely. Sometimes it would spin out of control or the needle would freeze in place no matter what direction I turned. The two young monks seemed to know exactly where they were going, but I was completely lost. There were days when I could have sworn we were covering ground we had covered the day before. I asked Zopa one night if he knew where we were. He shrugged. This time he wasn’t being abstruse. I don’t think he knew where we were either, and he didn’t seem to care.

  After a few days I stopped caring too. It was the strangest thing. I was beyond exhausted, stiff, sore, hungry, scratched, bug bitten, and sleep deprived. I didn’t complain, not even to myself. I stopped writing in my journal. It was like all the old voices inside my head had gone mute. I woke up at dawn, ate a few bites of food, started to walk up and down, up and down, stopped at dusk, ate a few bites of food, slept, then started again at dawn the next day. I wasn’t so much moving through the forest as I was a part of it. Sometimes I’d wake up and start walking before the others. Other times I’d be the last one awake and find that everyone had already left. It didn’t bother me. I’d eat a couple spoonfuls of rice, or whatever we had, then head in the direction I’d been heading the night before without the vaguest idea of where I was going or where I would end up.

  The two silent monks rode herd on us. If we got off track, a track that only they seemed to know, they would eventually show up and guide us back without a word.

  Yash was usually the last one to show up in our rough camps. I was always happy to see him because he would be carrying dead animals, or as he would announce almost every night, “I found some camp meat if you are hungry.” If it weren’t for  Yash, I think we might have starved to death.

  Sometimes it was a rabbit, or a squirrel, or a fish, or a bird. “Found,” of course, meant that he had killed the animals, but I had no idea how he had managed it. He wasn’t carrying a gun, or a spear, or a fishhook that I had seen. There were plenty of animals around, but most of them were running or flying around the canopy a hundred feet above our heads. The two monks also gathered food as we trudged along; plants, flowers, and herbs—all of which went into the communal pot at the end of the day. None of us got our fill, but none of us got sick, either, which may have been due to the monk’s food contribution.

  One night I told Zopa that I was under the impression that Buddhist monks did not eat meat, that it was forbidden for them to kill animals.

  “The big Buddhist food debate,” he said. “Which has been going on since Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha twenty-five hundred years ago. Buddhists are definitely not allowed to kill animals and are encouraged to be vegetarians, but this does not prevent them from eating animal flesh if that flesh was not expressly killed for their consumption.”

  “Yash killed this rabbit for you to eat.”

  “No, Yash killed this rabbit for you, Josh, and himself. I am merely sharing in the meal. Yash put the meat into our bowls. A Buddhist is required to eat anything and everything put into his bowl, whether it is something he likes or not. The Buddha was very popular. His begging bowl was seldom empty, which is probably why he was fat.”

  Monk joke. Our hardships had not made Zopa lose his sense of humor. Which brings me to our hardships.

  When you climb a mountain, there are times, brief moments, when you are totally living in the present, like when you are negotiating a perilous pitch or hanging on to a precarious hold. They don’t last long. You either succeed and move on, or you fail and fall. This climb, or death march, or whatever you want to call it, was different. It had gone beyond endurance to someplace I had never been before.

  The present intense.

  Part Two

  Pemako

  Snickers

  I heard a scraping sound.

  I’d been walking through the woods all morning, alone, waiting for one of the monks to show up and put me back on track. The terrain had leveled out to some degree. There were still accordion-like hills, but they weren’t nearly as steep. I only had to crawl on my hands and knees once.

  The scraping sound came again. It led me to a tall spire. A thick mist had moved in the night before, and I couldn’t see the top. I stood there, catching my breath, listening to the strange sound that I couldn’t see. Finally, something broke through the mist about seventy-five feet above my head, but I still couldn’t tell what it was. It was moving in slow motion. Once in a while it would get snagged on a branch, jerk back up, then start down again. I thought I was having some kind of hallucination from lack of food and exhaustion until I realized it was a bamboo basket being lowered by a rope.

  “Hello!” I called up into the mist. There was no answer. The basket continued its slow, spasmodic descent, landing within inches of my battered boots. It was empty. I sat down next to the basket, still not grasping what it meant until I remembered the cave we had camped in when we got down from Hkakabo Razi. The basket had been lowered down from a lama roost. Somewhere above me was a holy man. How did he know I was
here? I couldn’t see him through the mist, so he couldn’t have possibly seen me. Who fed him? We hadn’t seen anyone in days. He could climb down, but such a climb wouldn’t be easy even for me, especially in my condition. How long had he been up there? How old was he? What kind of shape was he in?

  Zopa came up behind me. I didn’t really hear him, but I sensed him. “Lama roost,” I said.

  “What do you have for the basket?” he asked.

  I didn’t have much. None of us did. I rummaged through my pack and found my spare water bottle and a handful of cooked rice I had wrapped in a kerchief to eat later. I put them in the basket.

  “We can do better than that,” Zopa said. He pulled a Snickers bar out of the cloth bag he carried over his shoulder, which I might have murdered him for a few days earlier. (I’m kidding . . . maybe.) He put it into the basket and gave the rope a jerk. The basket rose until the Snickers bar disappeared into the mist.

  “When is the last time you heard the helicopter?” Zopa asked.

  I had to think about this for a second because I hadn’t even thought about Shek or the helicopter in the past couple of days. “I don’t remember.”

  “The helicopter was right over the top of us two hours ago, as close as it has ever been.”

  That seemed impossible to me. Even if I were no longer concerned about it, I would have at least heard it. But maybe not. I hadn’t thought about anything in the past several days, not even putting one foot in front of the other as I trudged through the forest. I wasn’t so much moving through the forest as I was part of the forest.

  The sound of the moving basket stopped.

  “How long do you think he or she has been up there?”

  “I have heard of lamas perching in a roost for fifty years.”

  “What if someone doesn’t come along and fill the basket?”

  “Then their body dies and the spirit goes somewhere else.”

  “Reincarnation? Karma?”

  “Nothing really disappears. It simply moves. Karma may be restricted to this life. Good brings good, bad brings bad.”

  “What goes around comes around,” I said.

  “A good way to put it.”

  “Where did you get the candy bar?” I guess I was no longer part of the forest. The Snickers bar had moved me back into reality.

  “One of the trekkers on the Nyang gave it to me. She said she had brought it from the United States and was saving it for a special person. She thought I was that person. Apparently I was not. I was saving it to divide among ourselves in an emergency for a burst of sugar energy. We will not need it now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we have reached Pemako.”

  “This is it?”

  The two monks came out of the trees, followed by Josh and Yash. There was something different about the monks. I studied their faces and realized what it was. They were both smiling. Not broad grins, just a slight upturn at the corners of their lips. It was a look of contentment. The look of arriving home after a long absence.

  “Pemako?” I asked. I didn’t think they would answer, because they hadn’t said a word since we had met them. A vow of silence or something. But I hoped they would at least give me a nod or a head shake. They did more than that.

  “My name is Duga,” one of the monks said in perfect English. “This is my friend, Sonam.” They put their palms together and gave us a bow.  We returned the bow.

  “Is this Pemako?” I repeated.

  “Oh, yes,” Duga said. “But we have some distance before we arrive at the monastery.”

  * * *

  We walked for several more hours. It was still up and down, but the going was easier by the well-used path we were following with actual steps cut into the steep hillsides. Zopa and Sonam took the lead followed by Josh and Yash. Duga and I followed behind, taking our time. His vow of silence, or whatever it was, was over. He told me that his pregnant mother arrived here twenty-five years ago.

  “I was born at the monastery,” he said.

  “Is your mother still alive?”

  “Yes, but I have not seen her for ten years.”

  “She left Pemako?”

  “No, she is still here. When I was twelve, she retreated to a roost to meditate.”

  “The one we saw?”

  “I am not certain who is up there, but it is not my mother.”

  “Are you saying that your mother has been in a cave for ten years?”

  “Yes. My mother is no doubt very holy now. Our abbot was in a roost for more than fifteen years before he came down. He is very enlightened. You will meet him when we reach the monastery.”

  “Have you ever visited your mother in her roost?”

  “Yes. I have filled her basket many times.”

  “I meant have you climbed up to talk to her?”

  “No. That is not allowed. No visitors. But those who choose to retreat to the roosts are free to leave whenever they choose. When they come down another goes up. There is no shortage of volunteers. It is an honor.”

  “How many people are there in the monastery?”

  “As you will see, we have people who live inside the monastery and people who live outside the monastery. I am not sure how many. We say that there are enough.”

  “Where did you learn English?”

  “At the monastery. We have people from all over the world. We can learn any language we like from a very young age. I am a traveler. It is good to know other languages.”

  “Traveler?”

  “Someone who leaves here from time to time to do outside errands on behalf of the those who live here.”

  “Like leading Zopa here.”

  “Yes. But I am confident that he would have found us on his own, although it may have taken him longer. I was outside when I received word that Zopa needed a guide.”

  I didn’t ask him how he had received the word, figuring that it was probably the same brain-cell tower that Zopa seemed to have at times.

  We scrambled down a particularly steep ravine. I wasn’t looking forward to climbing up the other side, but when we got to the bottom Duga took a path to our left along a good-size stream. At first I thought he was leading me to a better crossing, but he passed several places we could have easily forded. A mile downstream we ran into a couple of monks coming our way, leading two yaks carrying heavy loads. They stopped and talked to Duga for a few minutes. When they continued on their way, Duga explained that the monks were wranglers. Their job was to deliver food for the roost baskets. The lamas were given food every other day. It was a long walk to the Snickers roost.

  The path led us to an enormous crater, three or four miles across, with several waterfalls pouring into it from fabulous heights. A thick mist hung over the basin. It was spectacular.

  “This is where our monastery is,” Duga said. “It is on the far side of the crater. You cannot see it through the mist. It appears that the others have gone ahead. If we hurry, we should be able to reach the monastery before nightfall.”

  We did not reach the monastery before nightfall, which was all my fault because I kept stopping to gawk at things on the way. The crater wasn’t a fictional paradise like Shangri-La. In fact, it was like many of the rural areas I’d walked through on my way to Everest the previous year. What made it different was its size. There were a lot of people living in the crater, and most of them were not monks. They were farmers, laborers, and herdsmen. I had expected to find an isolated monastery with a few dozen monks scrabbling a living from the forest, not a thriving community with families. I saw little kids running around playing and working alongside their parents, moms laboring in the rice paddies with babies strapped to their backs. There were fields of wheat and hay, fruit orchards, vegetable gardens, beehives, dairy cows, flocks of geese, and ducks. We stopped for one of these flocks to cross our path to a freshly harvested field, herded by a group of serious but smiling children.

  “For a place that no one knows about there are a lot of people here,”
I said as we waited.

  “People have lived in this place two thousand years,” Duga said above the riotous quacking.

  We continued walking.

  “Can people leave if they choose?”

  “Yes. Whenever they like, but very few leave. Everyone and everything they know is here. This is not to say they are ignorant of the outside world. We have a large library that everyone is free to use. Books, newspapers, and periodicals are brought in from the outside. Granted, some of the reading material is dated, but still pertinent. There are lectures and discussions every week and open to anyone who wants to attend. World history, current events, art, economics, religion, philosophy, wildlife conservation, environmental issues . . . no subject is forbidden. The topics are voted upon. Simple majority rules. The librarian decides who will lead the discussion and gives them time to prepare.”

  “You have a librarian?”

  “We have several. By librarian I mean our head librarian, Tashi. He is also called ‘the memory monk’ because he remembers perfectly everything he reads, sees, and hears.” Duga laughed. “We are afraid that one day his head will burst with knowledge.”

  I guess Duga was the funny monk, just like Zopa was the cagey monk.

  “What happens if someone does leave?” I asked. “Can they come back?”

  “If the crater allows, but that is rare.”

  It was strange how Duga made the crater sound like a person, not a place.

  “Why were we allowed?” I asked.

  “Because of Zopa, I presume.”

  This didn’t come even close to answering my question. I waited, expecting Duga to change the subject, but he surprised me.

  “Zopa has been heading for our monastery most of his life. Twice before he has gotten close, according to Dawa, our abbot, but his pilgrimage was interrupted. We do not know why.”

  I knew why. Saving Chin from the avalanche on Hkakabo Razi and the death of his son, Ki-tar, after he saved Josh from K2.

  “Is it possible to reach the monastery without a guide?”