by Ian Baker
The strangeness of the proceedings eroded our deep-seated resentment at having been thwarted in our journey. Should all turn out to be in order in Menling, the officer assured us, he would help us on our return. Completely drunk, we climbed back into the open-air truck and the driver headed off under the morning sun, picking up passengers until the vehicle was overflowing with local villagers, nomads, and the two undercover policemen deputied to keep their eyes on us until we reached Menling.
The driver stopped in a streambed to pick up two Khampa pilgrims whom we had met earlier on their way back from Gyala. With black tassles wrapped around their heads, high leather boots and leather jackets, they looked more like pirates than pilgrims. They asked me where we were going and I told him of our intended journey through Pemako. One of the Khampas grinned at me with his gold tooth and ran his fingers along the edge of his sword. Comparing its razor edge to the paths through Pemako’s precipitous mountains, he said, “Pemako’s like this, one wrong step and you fall.”
ALL ACCOUNTS OF PEMAKO seemed to contain this strange mixture of wonder and dread. On one hand it was an earthly paradise and on the other a veritable hell of nearly incessant rain, eroding trails, and insect-infested jungles. I thought back to the wife of Tenzing Norgay who had made her pilgrimage into Pemako despite Chatral Rinpoche’s warnings and unfavorable divinations. She had returned swollen and feverish and died soon afterward in a state of rapture.
For the pilgrim, dying in Pemako is considered oddly fortuitous. Tradition maintains that those who perish there will not pass through the bardo—a harrowing interim between one life and the next—but be liberated into a realm of celestial light. Before I left Nepal, Chatral Rinpoche told me that many people had died in Pemako. Conventional Tibetan wisdom decrees that if you drown in one of Pemako’s rivers or are bitten by one of the beyul’s numerous species of poisonous snakes, there’s no need to worry. If pure vision is maintained, powa—the transference of consciousness from the physical body—occurs spontaneously. Believing this, many pilgrims have pushed beyond their physical limits and never returned. After sharing these perspectives with a female friend in Kathmandu, she promised she wouldn’t mourn if I didn’t come back, but rejoice in my good fortune.
Toward dusk we finally arrived in Menling, utterly exhausted after standing in the back of the truck for seven hours, as sitting was too jarring on the spine. Like us, the town was somewhat worse for wear. A characterless Chinese outpost bordered by steep, thickly forested hills, Menling lies close to the Indian LOC, or political line of control. We pulled in to the district police headquarters where Gunn went in to talk with the authorities. He returned within minutes. No problem, he said, we could proceed as planned. When we asked why we had been brought back after the same authorities had already inspected our permits in Kyikar several days earlier, we received no comprehensible response. Gunn, personally, suspected Breashears and Wiltsie of trying to sabotage Rick’s expedition after their own failure to make it through the gorge. While competitiveness has plagued exploration since before Burton and Speke’s quarrel over the headwaters of the Nile or Scott and Amundsen’s race for the South Pole, Ken’s and my own suspicions lay firmly with a display of power by the local Chinese administration.
The following morning we stocked up on additional provisions—tinned pork, glass jars of mandarin oranges, and army surplus survival food, with a main ingredient that turned out to be pig’s fat—and then reboarded the truck for the long drive back to Kyikar. This time the truck was overloaded with a group of Kongpo women with thickly swaddled infants who appeared from under stacks of what we had taken to be their luggage. The ride was boisterous, as the women laughed and drank chang from their Mao caps while their babies remained disturbingly still. At the roadhead, we regrouped with Sherab, our head porter, who seemed both surprised and pleased to see us. The police official was nowhere to be seen.
We broke camp early the next morning, stopping at the hot springs to divest ourselves of accumulated grime and then proceeding past the first rapids into the broad valley which four days earlier had been filled with grazing horses. Namcha Barwa stood out majestically above the forested slopes before being enveloped again in clouds.12
ANOTHER HOUR DOWN THE TRAIL, Sherab and our other porters put down their loads and again demanded more pay. Gunn left it to me to negotiate. In my rudimentary Tibetan, I told the porters that we would pay them much more than Gunn had offered if they could take us through the gorge. I promised more money than we had, calculating that we could deal with this once we had reached our destination. Pacified by the promise of exorbitant wages, they picked up the pace and we covered the fifteen miles to Gyala in a single day. We walked into the village at dusk, armed with rocks against the savage mastiffs that guarded the village’s periphery and startling Gyala’s headman, whose own dog was now securely chained.
Four days had been lost, and Gunn was morose: “We will never reach in time,” he said. I was concerned too, but tried to look at it more philosophically. In the Buddhist sense, né-kor, or pilgrimage, implies—in part—a journey beyond the human impulse to control one’s experience and an openness to serendipity. We ended the day drinking butter tea at the headman’s house while his daughter baked us bread over an open hearth. Ken immersed himself in a paperback edition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude.
IN THE LIGHT OF A pitch pine lantern that turned a blackened prayer wheel suspended from the rafters, I pored over the Pemako neyigs that I had brought with me from Nepal. The headman’s wife told me that the villagers had been forced at gunpoint to throw all their block-printed Buddhist texts into the Tsangpo during the Cultural Revolution, and I regretted that I had not brought copies of the Tibetan originals to give to them. Tibet in the 1960s had been much like what Padmasambhava had prophesized in his termas: a period of brutal betrayals and mass destruction. The neyigs all began with accounts of these apocalyptic times and invoked the hidden-lands as places of refuge and spiritual renewal.
Before leaving Nepal, Chatral Rinpoche had told me that the neyigs reveal the underlying nature of the hidden-lands, but that the qualities of the beyul are by no means restricted to what is written. The most essential teachings in Tibetan Buddhism, Chatral Rinpoche said, have never been written down. The revealed-texts I was reading equate the flow of the Tsangpo through the gorge with the life current of Dorje Pagmo, the Tantric goddess whose body forms an esoteric map of Pemako as a whole. The peak of Gyala Pelri, which looms above Gyala “like a pig gazing into the sky,” is invoked as her head while the massif of Namcha Barwa—“like an eight-petalled lotus”—forms her mountainous breasts. In the tangle of mountains and jungles farther to the south lie her heart and womb, places said to be brimming with magical healing plants.13
To follow the course of the Tsangpo through its mist-filled gorges, the neyigs suggest, is to be absorbed into the anatomy of this “Mother of all Buddhas,” and to be initiated into her mysteries.
When the pitch pine had burned low and stacks of barley bread for the morning meal had been piled high on the hearth, I retired to my tent, the light of the porters’ fire flickering through the red nylon walls. As I was preparing for sleep, someone began pulling down the zipper of the tent door and I immediately imagined that either Ken or Sherab had come to announce another crisis such as we had had with the police officer. But instead it was a woman in a felt tunic whom I had seen earlier threshing grain by the river. She crawled in unbidden. “It’s big in here,” she said in a Kongpo dialect. “Are you going to sleep here alone?” Not sure if I had heard her correctly, I replied immediately that I was. Nonetheless, she stretched out on the floor and then reached through the shadows to run a hand along my arm.
Was this some kind of trial? The neyigs I had just been reading proclaim the women of Pemako to be emanations of Dorje Pagmo, initiatresses into hidden regions of the psyche. But like all dakinis, they are trickster figures that can lead the unwary dangerously o
ff course. I reflected on the tertons who, to open the hidden-lands, had often availed themselves of local consorts; the alchemy of desire revealing hidden dimensions of mind and planet. The problem was I had no desire for my uninvited guest. Although wavering—I felt a bit like Galahad in the Castle of Temptations—I declined her advances. With a rough squeeze of my hand she crawled back out of the tent.
As I lay back in my down sleeping bag, I wondered whether I had passed a test or failed miserably by catering to my doubts and hesitations. My mind ran through a labyrinth of possibilities, not least of which was a concern that I was thinking too much. I recalled the words of a Scottish missionary who was active in Tibet in the late 1940s: “Tibetans were neither completely polygamous nor completely polyandrous. They were generally promiscuous.”14
Descent into the Upper Gorge
WHEN I AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING, the skies were clear, and Gyala Pelri, the mountain invoked as Dorje Pagmo’s head—“the crown center of infinite bliss”—gleamed above the northern walls of the gorge. The waterfall of Shinje Chogyal cascaded down the opposite bank, spilling into the Tsangpo which crested into small, shimmering waves. The neyigs described the section of the gorge we were about to enter as Dorje Pagmo’s throat chakra,15 the door into the hidden worlds farther downriver. For four or five days we would be on a track of some kind. After the ruins at Pemakochung we would be on unknown ground. As we headed out of the village, our gear loaded into freshly woven bamboo baskets, Olmula stood waving at us and muttering benedictions. Half jokingly, I told Sherab, walking beside me with his mala in hand, that Olmula might well be a manifestation of Dorje Pagmo. He nodded. “Dorje Pagmo’s energies spread to all corners of Pemako,” he said, “from the highest summits to the last blade of grass. To those of vision, whose channels are clear, all women are her emanations and these mountains are her palaces and charnel grounds.”16
As we walked across sand dunes at the edge of the Tsangpo, I felt the sense of crossing an invisible threshold. We passed a rock outcrop associated with a local protector deity, a stone incense burner still smoldering with dawn offerings of juniper and fragrant herbs. The porters circled it before continuing, mantras flowing from their lips.
AN HOUR BEYOND GYALA we began to climb through a dense tangle of bamboo and rhododendrons with smooth bark that peeled off in our hands like red parchment. The ground was carpeted in a thick layer of damp leaves. Rare sunlight drifted through the canopy, occasionally touching the green-tailed parakeets flitting through the delicate latticework. We contoured past a black cliff that Sherab referred to as an “iron gate” associated with a spirit entity who guards this entryway into the gorge.
We climbed over grassy ledges to a pine-covered spur high above the Tsangpo. Ken’s altimeter showed us to be 11,200 feet above sea level. The porters called this pass Musi-La, in reference to cold sulfur springs that oozed over the rocks, leaving a thick, gummy deposit. In Kingdon Ward’s day, the sulfur was collected and sent to Lhasa or paid as tax to the Powo rajahs. An eighteenth-century lama named Lelung Shepe Dorje had described the yellowish secretions as the secret water, or urine, of Dorje Pagmo, and he had rubbed it eagerly into his limbs.
WHEN KINGDON WARD entered the gorge in 1924 he was well aware of Tibetan myths of an earthly paradise. He wrote of Pemako as “the Promised Land of Tibetan prophecy,” as “a land flowing with milk and honey . . . hidden behind misty barriers where ordinary men do not go.” His own perspectives on the area, however, were hardly romanticized: “Not only is Pemako extraordinarily difficult to reach from any direction,” he wrote, “it is still more difficult to penetrate and explore when reached. Surrounded on three sides by the gorges of the Tsangpo, the fourth is blocked by mighty ranges of snow mountains, whose passes are only open for a few months in the year. Beyond these immediate barriers to east and west and south, are dense trackless forests, inhabited by wild unfriendly tribes. . . . Add to this . . . a climate which varies from the sub-tropical to arctic, the only thing common to the whole region being perpetual rain, snakes and wild animals, giant stinging nettles and myriads of biting and blood-sucking ticks, hornets, flies and leeches, and you have some idea of what the traveler has to contend with.”
Although Kingdon Ward’s foremost ambition was to resolve the mystery of the fabled waterfall, his professional objective was “to collect seeds of beautiful hardy flowering plants for English gardens.” Sponsored on his journey by government grants, seed companies, and wealthy patrons, including his companion, the twenty-four-year-old Thane of Cawdor, Kingdon Ward would discover at least ten new species of rhododendrons and numerous other plants including the blue poppy (Meconopsis betonicifolia), which ultimately thrived in Britain’s wet and temperate climate.17 The flora of the Tsangpo gorges, Kingdon Ward wrote, “covers the whole gamut from the tropics to the Arctic.” Many species proved to be unique and have yet to be found anywhere else. Although some of the seeds that Kingdon Ward collected only blossomed twenty years later, flower species from the Tsangpo gorges continue to grace the world’s gardens—from Kew in London to the Dalai Lama’s Norbu Lingka palace in Lhasa.
Tibetan texts describe Pemako as a horticulturist’s heaven, overflowing with life-sustaining and, at times, miraculous, plants. One of Padmasambhava’s termas, Wishfulfilling Light Rays, makes bold claims for these uncatalogued species: This supreme plant . . . allows humans, wild animals, and even insects to attain Buddhahood. [Consuming] it will increase one’s wisdom and lead to miracles such as leaving imprints of one’s feet and hands on solid rock.
In [Pemako’s] secret chakra, a place blessed by the wisdom dakinis . . . bloom pink colored flowers. The sweet scent of these flowers can induce bliss. . . . Eating them one can survive for years.
Kingdon Ward took no particular interest in the ethnobotanical aspects of Pemako’s plants, whether the plant poisons used by the Lopas on their hunting arrows or the healing herbs prized in the Tibetan medical tradition, but the flora intoxicated him just the same. When he first came upon the species of rhododendron named Scarlet Runner, he stood mesmerized: “For a moment we just stared at it,” he wrote, “drunk with wonder.” Lord Cawdor, however, became increasingly disenchanted by Kingdon Ward’s obsessive plant hunting. On November 19, 1924, he wrote in his journal: “After eight months in this infernal country I shouldn’t have imagined anyone would wish to see another rhododendron again—I’m damned certain I don’t!”
ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE PASS, we descended into a grove of Himalayan fir, their massive trunks rising unbranched for nearly 100 feet. We made our first camp in the shadows of the trees. After dinner, the porters stood in a circle around an enormous fire piled high with fir boughs, chanting into the billowing flames the words of the Barche Lamsel, an ancient prayer attributed to Padmasambhava to remove obstacles on one’s path. The brighter the blaze, the more intensely they chanted, until the radiating sparks threatened to ignite our tents.
I looked at the faces of our crew, illuminated in the light of the fire and unified in their common faith. Some were dressed in traditional Kongpo-style tunics fashioned from matted wool. Others wore Chinese military fatigues or Mao jackets. Amulets dangled around their necks. Machetelike swords were thrust through sashes and smaller knives hung in silver scabbards from their belts. Some carried pack baskets of split bamboo. Others tied their gear to aluminum frames that had been left behind by the expedition on Namcha Barwa. Several of the porters had been as far as Pemakochung—on pilgrimages or hunting trips—but each year the trail is reclaimed by jungle or altered by landslides and they proceed as much by intuition as by clear knowledge of the way.
Eric threw the packaging from a freeze-dried dinner into the fire and Dawa Tsering came up to tell us that such actions would offend the spirits of the land and could bring rain. Besides, there are migyu, large apelike proto-humanoids in the area, he insisted, and burning garbage irritates them. Normally they hide from human beings,
Dawa said, but if angered they have been known to kill people. We promised to throw our refuse elsewhere. In the local worldview, every action establishes a relationship with the environment. Estrangement from nature is not an option. Even one’s subtlest thoughts and intentions— whether positive or negative—are held to elicit a response from the animating forces within the landscape. Ill thoughts and selfish concerns can cause rockfalls and hail. Well-directed prayers, on the other hand, can literally stop the rain. A constant interchange occurs, giving rise to what Tibetans call tukje, Great Compassion, or empathy with all things.
THE NEXT MORNING, May 1, we awoke to birdsong filtering down from the trees overhead. Khamtrul Rinpoche and other lamas maintained that some of Pemako’s avian species incant mantras. Some of the early tertons, Khamtrul Rinpoche said, had been guided deeper into the beyul by following their delicate songs.
We descended through strands of bamboo and rhododendron to the banks of the Tsangpo. Ken’s altimeter gave a reading of 8,900 feet. The Tsangpo had transformed into seething rapids, an explosion of waves disappearing below us between steep cliffs. On the opposite bank, glaciers poured into a narrow valley, their meltwater merging into a gray torrent which disgorged into the Tsangpo. Earlier in the century, a small monastic complex called Vulture Hermitage had been built into the cliffs on the opposite bank, but no trace now remained. Sulfur springs oozed over the rocks at our feet while waves surging up from the Tsangpo drenched us in mist and spray. The porters had put down their loads and were staring raptly into the drifting mist in the valley on the opposite bank. Sherab told me it was a hidden né called Gyala Sengdum, where the faithful could receive visions. I looked up through the aqueous light, but all I could see was a wall of ice emerging momentarily from behind thick banks of cloud.
