by Ian Baker
As we continued downriver through a forest of alder and willows Sherab pointed out an abandoned meditation hut built into a cliff on the other side of the river. Goltsang Tulku, the head lama of Vulture Hermitage, had once resided there, Sherab told me. He recounted a local legend that holds that a large fir tree downriver from Goltsang Tulku’s retreat grew from the staff which he planted in the earth as he flew up into the sky. We had clearly entered the Tibetan dreamtime.
WE CONTINUED DOWNRIVER along the banks of the Tsangpo, forging our way among slick rocks soaked in spray. At a place the porters called Denobanja we took out climbing ropes to ascend a short cliff. When sheer walls blocked further passage down the river, the porters paused to brew tea at a small side stream that wound through a ravine. Afterward we began to climb steeply through a dense forest of bamboo, birch, and rhododendron. The ground writhed with leeches. The lama Lelung Shepe Dorje had referred to them in a journal of his pilgrimage through Pemako in 1729: “Their bodies are round and thin like sticks of incence, but after sucking your blood, they become the size of a thumb. Unless they have their fill, they never loosen their bite. These leeches are everywhere.”
A recent avalanche had cut a wide swath through the jungle and we climbed up through banks of snow and rubble toward the Tomtom-La, the second of the four major passes between Gyala and Pemakochung. In local belief, the 9,700-foot pass represents the route by which the Chinese bride of the Tibetan emperer Songtsengampo was carried in a palanquin on her way from Powo to Lhasa in the seventh century. On the far side of the pass the vegetation became more dense and layered. Pine, bamboo, maple, and birch covered the slopes, alternating as we moved between exposed faces and sheltered gullies. Omnipresent was the tangle of red branches and flowers that cloaked both sides of the gorge and which had led Kingdon Ward to refer to Pemako as a “rhododendron fairyland.” Ken recognized several of the species that had delighted British horticulturists when Kingdon Ward first introduced them in 1925. Shrubs of Rhododendron maddeni sprouted from sheer rock walls. Rhododendron thomsoni was clearly distinguishable by its red dripping leaves while massive specimens of Rhododendron grande towered in places to more than forty feet.
Most of the rhododendrons’ leaf buds were still closed to protect them from frost, but some were already flowering, their large bells opening into the light of spring. Green-backed tits and fire-tailed sunbirds, their tongues rolled into tiny tubes, pecked at the purple and red corollas, drawing up their hidden nectar. Looking at the fallen blossoms lying in glowing heaps beneath the gnarled trees, I recalled that the Pemako neyigs tell of raining flowers.
We descended through the trees in light drizzle and reached a glen called Tsongchenkega, where a series of notched logs brought us to the top of a cliff. We camped not long afterward among giant boulders near the banks of the Tsangpo.
I had brought Lelung Shepe Dorje’s journal with me and I read more of it that night. For Shepe Dorje, the Laughing Vajra, the Tsangpo gorges spread out like a fabulous text that he interpreted with the signs, codes, and symbols at his disposal.18 As he and his retinue entered deeper into the gorge in search of Dorje Pagmo’s heart center, their world transformed along with their vision. During the day—“slipping down by holding on to dangling tree roots”—Shepe Dorje wrote of breaking into spontaneous song. At night dreams carried him farther into Pemako’s hidden realms. But as he and his party ventured deeper, the hazards increased:
The path now is very steep and difficult. My attendant Tsering Norbu was hit by a falling stone . . . but at last we reached our night’s resting place. The others complained that the way is too dangerous and our destination too far away; that it would be better to return to Gyala. But due to the prophecies I received, the deities Oddan Karpo and Shingchongma promised to assist, and I resolved that if we are unable to reach our destination, it would be better not to return.
Eric sat by the fire silently making carvings on his walking stick. Ken was immersed in Wordsworth, sharing passages that resonated with what I had told him of the Pemako neyigs. Ken pointed out that Wordsworth’s poetry had similarly transformed perceptions of landscape, his evocations of his native Lake District revealing “a new heaven and earth” in which “life’s every-day appearances” could be redeemed in the act of creative perception.
As the porters chanted around a blazing fire, Ken and I sat in the rain and discussed how Tibetan literature concerning hidden-lands had promoted an indigenous, if unacknowledged, cult of the sublime. The poetry of the Romantics, like the neyigs, had pointed to the unity between mind and nature and helped transform the natural world from a resource to be exploited into an intimate expression of the Divine. Writing of the English Lake District, Wordsworth described the valley of Grasmere as a “Paradise before him,” echoing Milton’s description of Eden in Paradise Lost.19
On his approach to the Tsangpo gorge, Lord Cawdor recorded in his journal that he was reading a commentary on Milton’s Paradise Lost that had been published in London’s Spectator in March 1712. Despite such reading material, he was little affected by literary notions of an earthly paradise, nor by Kingdon Ward’s ecstatic proclamations of the “paradise of primulas” and other plants which surrounded them. Along with extensive ethnographic notes that he contributed to Kingdon Ward’s book, Riddle of Tsangpo Gorges, Lord Cawdor’s journals illuminated their unrelenting hardships. On November 26, 1924, he wrote: Rain down here. Snow very low down—Jungle thoroughly sodden. This is without exception, the most depressing country I’ve ever been in. It may grow more weeds “per foot” than any other country, but what is that to me—Blast these showers! I’d sell my soul to see some honest weather again.
Tibetan pilgrimage guides liken Pemako’s landscape to the unfolding petals of a mystic lotus emerging from the body of a Tantric goddess. Although the texts make reference to specific geographical features, their symbolic language reorients pilgrims to their surroundings, transforming primeval wilderness into a realm of spiritual redemption. If for Wordsworth paradise could be recovered through the “internal brightness” of poetic imagination, for Tibetans like Shepe Dorje it demands a burning away of all false perceptions. In the Buddhist sense, imagination does not so much transform as reveal what is already present, the mind’s inherent creativity realizing its essential unity with all phenomena and events. Paradise is thus not so much a place as liberation into the fullness and bounty of everyday experience—Eden in its etymological sense of a “garden of Delight.”
For Kingdon Ward, the intrepid plant collector, the notion of paradise was intimately linked to the luxuriant gardens that he supplied with exotic flowering plants. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English works on gardening bore titles such as Paradise Retrieved and Paradise Regained; botanical gardens were widely viewed as artificial paradises to compensate for the Eden that had disappeared. The earliest English gardens had been church sanctuaries that preserved memories of a lost Eden, walled gardens with a sense of order that reflected the Western myth of a realm impervious to suffering and death. As horticulture became inextricably associated with the expansion of the British Empire, cloistered gardens evolved into heated glass houses displaying exotic specimens appropriated from far corners of the globe. At the height of the British Empire gardeners often sought to create sublime landscapes where boundaries between the cultivated and the wild were purposefully blurred. The species of rhododendrons, magnolias, and other plants that Kingdon Ward introduced from Tibet enhanced the beauty of these woodland gardens with their meandering paths, ponds, and ravines. As new seeds flooded the market, wealthy landlords competed with each other for ribbons through foundations such as the Rhododendrons Society.
At his home at Cleeve Court in Berkshire, Kingdon Ward created a rock garden that simulated the great bend of the Tsangpo. He planted the steep banks of the stream with barberry, azalea, and rhododendron seedlings that he had brought back from Tibet. Although Lord Cawdo
r did not fully share Kingdon Ward’s passion for collecting plants in the field, he was a zealous gardener, and rhododendrons, barberries, cotoneasters, and roses from the Tsangpo gorge still flourish in the gardens at Auchindoune, the Cawdor dower house a half hour’s walk from Cawdor Castle along peat-black streams and through a forest of ancient oaks.20 I went there one summer in search of the journals that the young thane had kept on his journey through the Tsangpo gorge.
The six clothbound diaries offered an intimate portrait of the conditions that the two explorers had faced in the gorge, but the most intriguing passages had been scratched out long ago by the thane’s own hand. I’d learned far more from the countess herself.
Born into Bohemian aristocracy, Countess Angelika Illona Lazansky von Bukowa had married Jack Cawdor’s son Hugh, the sixth thane of Cawdor. She traveled to the Himalayas where she recognized many plant species that her father-in-law had brought back from Tibet. Using notes from the 1920s when the gardens at Auchindoune were first laid out, she restored them to their original glory. She had also created a “Paradise garden” near the entrance to the fourteenth-century castle that was immortalized in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
The countess guided me past a hedged labyrinth to a narrowing path that led beyond thorn bushes and towering thistles to a sanctuary where a fountain representing the waters of life spilled over into a wealth of flowers that she had planted according to the color symbolism of Goethe. “The Victorians and Edwardians were obsessed with exotic plants,” the countess told me, “but for me, it is the sound and flow of water that is central to all existence.”
Kingdon Ward’s ambition of “enriching the beauty of his native land” with flowers from the farthest corners of the British Empire had been surpassed by the countess’s grander vision. Lady Cawdor spoke of the peaceable kingdom, of communion between species. She told me of a local Benedictine saint who, rapt in prayer, would wade naked into the frigid waters of the North Sea and return to shore to be dried by sea otters.
When we parted on the castle drawbridge, she took nuts from the pocket of her tweed jacket as a flock of birds roosting in the castle walls swooped down to eat from her hands. For the countess, paradise was not something lost at the far edges of the earth, but a primal harmony to be realized on one’s native soil.
In a like manner, the Tibetans had counteracted the corruption, worldliness, and war that had pervaded their centers of power by envisioning their borderlands as an immanent paradise. The thousand-petaled lotus held to bloom in Pemako’s innermost center symbolized the blossoming of humanity’s highest potential.21 The flower is referred to in a poem by a fifteenth-century mystic named Kabir.
Don’t go outside your house to seek flowers.
My friend, don’t bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals
Centered there you will have a glimpse of Splendour
Inside the body and without;
Before and after gardens.
ON THE FOLLOWING DAY, May 2, we ascended steeply along precarious ledges covered in dwarf rhododendrons and wild roses to a pass called Nyuksang-La. On the far side, we cut our way through thick rhododendrons, their trunks and branches smooth like opaque red glass. Across the gorge, a glacier curled into the Tsangpo like a frozen tongue, the surging river carving away at its tip. Traversing on ledges along a mossy cliff we saw beneath us the carcass of a takin, a shaggy Himalayan ruminant related to the Arctic musk ox, which had fallen from a cliff. In a grim vision of the web of life, bushy-tailed martins pranced on top of it, devouring its flesh. Continuing on, we emerged into an open valley encircled by glacier-covered peaks.
The northern walls of Namcha Barwa glittered above us like an ice-encrusted palace. Ken and I lingered behind as the rest of the team made its way through bogs and open forest. When we tried to pick up the trail, there was no sign of their passage, nor any response to our calls. For more than an hour we bushwhacked amid flowering rhododendrons and crystalline streams. Finally we heard Sherab’s calls and followed them up a stream which we crossed on fallen logs. The porters were brewing their midday tea under the arching roof of an overhanging cliff, huddled against the rock wall to escape a burst of rain. After eating we continued through dense forest and emerged at a sandy beach on the banks of the Tsangpo. A pair of leopards had left tracks in the wet sand.
We camped that night at an overhanging boulder. Hunters had etched inverted peace signs into the rock as a sign of the musk deer that they had killed nearby. A strange protuberance on the side of the rock was held by the porters to be a rangjung, or self-manifested, image of the purba, or magical dagger, wielded by Dorje Traktsen, the spirit guardian of this myth-drenched terrain. The porters invoked him again that night, seeking his protection by heaping fragrant branches of juniper and fir onto a blazing fire.
When they had finished their prayers, Sherab approached me on behalf of the other porters. They wanted to be paid now for taking us to Pemakochung even though we were still more than a day’s journey away. They seemed to doubt that we would actually pay the double rates that we had agreed to. Gunn sat by the fire drying out his sneakers and studiously ignoring the proceedings. After much reassurance, the porters finally agreed to be paid the following day when, if all went according to plan, we would arrive at Pemakochung. We began to suspect that the porters had no real intention of going with us into the unknown tracts beyond the ruined monastery. That night it began to rain heavily and the Chinese tent supplied to me by Gunn’s agency flooded with water.
THE FOLLOWING DAY we left the hunters’ camp in thick mist and descended into a great cleft ravaged by landslides. The Tsangpo surged below us. As we reentered the forest, the tangle of rhododendrons grew ever denser. Kingdon Ward had noted that as the gorge narrows and the climate becomes wetter, the rhododendron species prevalent higher up in the gorge give way nearly entirely to Indo-Malayan varieties characteristic of temperate rain forests. The bulk of the forest was composed of Rhododendron irroratrum and a purple-flowering Aroreum. A less prevalent species, R. maddeni, had intrigued Kingdon Ward for its peculiar venation, the sunken channeled veins on the upper surface of the leaves leaving embossed images on the lower. To our porters the unusual patterns on the leaves suggested mantric syllables, more evidence, like the figures on the rocks, that we were on hallowed ground. Kingdon Ward wrote of the species that it “grows on the sheerest of cliffs and in addition to being uncommon, is often inaccessible.” Ward had entered the Tsangpo gorge in autumn and saw only stray blooms of rhododendrons that had opened out of season. He speculated on how the gorge would appear in early spring: “The forest then, tier on tier from the dripping snow to the rocking river must be one incandescent lava stream of rhododendron blossom.”
The rhododendrons were riveting. More than 154 species have been documented in the Namcha Barwa region along with 218 varieties of orchids and 20 different types of bamboo. This region of Pemako alone has been estimated to contain more than 1,410 plant species, an unprecedented diversity. Still uncatalogued were the five psychotropic plants described in the Pemako neyigs.22
Bhakha Tulku had told me how two hunters who had run out of food had accidentally discovered one of these magical plants. Unable to secure game, the hunters had survived by eating roots and flowers in the jungle. One of the hunters ate an unknown plant and soon began to feel as if he was rising off the ground. Startled and afraid, the other hunter told him to put the animal skin he had been sitting on over the top of his head to dampen the effects. I asked Sherab and Dawa whether they had ever come across such plants, but neither he nor any of the other hunters had ever found them. “You have to be very lucky,” Sherab said.
The hunters did rely on wild food, however, and they were particularly fond of the large broom mushrooms that grew on cliffs and tree trunks. One porter had eaten one of these fungi during our midday tea break a
nd he was now lying on the trail in a fetal position, clutching his stomach. I sought remedies from my meager first-aid kit and finally administered a dose of colocynthis, a homeopathic medicine derived from bitter cucumber. Within ten minutes he was on his feet again and shouldering his load.
IN STEADY RAIN, we proceeded down the right bank of the Tsangpo. Enormous boulders covered in slick moss made our passage progressively more difficult. The river was swollen, and splintered logs swept down in floods were jammed into small bays. The rising water level soon forced us to leave the river and to cut our way through dense jungle. Lord Cawdor had written unhappily of his passage through this terrain in 1924: The going was very bad and steep, up ladders and slippery rocks for the most part. After that and naturally we came down the other side—The road through the jungle was of the usual order—Bogs, rocks, slippery tree trunks (some with notches cut), rocky ledges, landslides, etc. . . . quite enough to keep one busy even if one hadn’t a load to hump and we went very slowly for we had to keep hauling coolies over the worst places.
