The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  I thought back to David Breashears’s description of this route into the gorge as more arduous than climbing Mount Everest. Although the route was often dangerous due to falling rocks and collapsing ledges, I couldn’t help but suspect that his accounts had been meant to discourage us from attempting the journey that he and Wiltsie had been forced to abandon. We had seen curiously little evidence of their passage and when I inquired of Dawa he told me that two weeks ago the river level had been lower and that they had been able to follow the banks of the Tsangpo during the final push into Pemakochung. With the increasing rain Dawa feared that the route along the river would be submerged. The only way to reach Pemakochung now, Dawa claimed, would be by climbing over a pass to a swamp called Tsokalamembar—Lake of Burning Fire. The other hunters looked doubtful, but as Dawa was the only one who had been to Pemakochung in recent months, they agreed to go. Sherab talked of natural lights that appear in the marsh. If you follow them, he said, you’re likely to drown in the mire. In the minds of our Tibetan guides the holy swamp was clearly a dangerous place.

  One reason for their hesitation quickly became apparent when we reached the base of a rock wall that Dawa said we had no choice but to climb. The route, up eroding gullies and unstable ledges, was truly harrowing. Shepe Dorje had made the same ascent in 1729 and described rocks the size of sheep hurtling down the face of the cliff. Two thousand feet above the Tsangpo we finally topped out into a thick tangle of moss-covered rhododendrons with scattered birch and pine. We then followed an avalanche chute toward the great marsh of Tsokalamembar and the lake that lies cradled in its center.

  It was raining, and banners of mist drifted through the trees. The swamp was infested with Rhododendron irroratum, bloodred flowers spilling into the bog. Beaded strands of Spanish moss hung like nets from the sodden branches. When the lama Shepe Dorje entered the bog in 1729 he described how his feet “sunk the length of a forearm” into the oozing mud. We crossed the marsh and entered a thick tangle of rhododendrons worthy of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. We broke for tea under the dense canopy of leaves and smooth looping branches drenched with epiphytes. Afterward we forged our way through the forest and trudged through lingering banks of snow toward the 10,450-foot pass which would lead us into Pemakochung. As we crossed the saddle, Namcha Barwa appeared through a window in the dense tangle of branches. Glaciers poured down its northern slope and disappeared into jungle. Kingdon Ward had referred to this view as “coldly menacing”: “The snow peaks enclosed us in a ring of ice. . . . Dense jungle surged over the cliffs . . . a maelstrom of river, forest, and ice fighting dumbly for dominion.”

  Hidden amid the swamps below us lay the ruins of Pemakochung’s former monastery. We made the steep descent through rain and fog, clinging to branches and swinging our way down through a wet, bramble-filled forest. It was at this point that Lord Cawdor had written of porters falling through “a net work of roots, another time into a big hole. . . . The jungle was very thick—huge trees, masses of rhododendrons, with an undergrowth of tall ferns. Even at this time of year a great deal of verdure comes above one’s head, and everything is crawling with ticks and leeches—What it can be like in the rains, I can’t imagine—God! How I loathe all jungles.”

  As we descended toward the abandoned gompa a vast amphitheater opened around us. The pyramidal peaks of Namcha Barwa soared above us, and a granite wall—snow clinging to its upper slopes and red-flowered rhododendrons advancing up the slabs—framed the valley from the west. Great torrents poured off Namcha Barwa’s glaciers into the marshes and forests. We proceeded through leech-infested swamps to a small hillock where the crumbled walls of the old monastery were slowly sinking into the earth. A pomegranate tree laden with overripe fruit spread above us while a headless statue of Tara, a female Buddha, sat perched on a moss-covered wall. Bronze butter lamps and a pair of broken cymbals lay amid the ruins. As the porters strung prayer flags between two fir trees, Ken, Eric, Jill, and I set up our tents, using bamboo stalks to lift them off the sodden ground. When Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Bailey traveled into the gorge in 1913 he had referred to Pemakochung as an “abomination of desolation” and “one of the world’s dead ends.” Taking in the rain and mud and leeches, I reflected that little had changed.

  Pemakochung

  CAMPED AMID THE RUINS, I thought again of the first account of Pemakochung that Kinthup had brought to the West, and of how in 1884, the Trigonometrical Survey Department had garbled his report and indicated that two miles below the monastery the Tsangpo pours over a 150-foot cliff. When Kingdon Ward and Lord Cawdor reached Pemakochung in 1924 the confusion concerning “Kinthup’s Falls” had already been resolved. If there were a larger waterfall on the Tsangpo they would find it farther downriver. While Kingdon Ward scrambled up cliffs to collect seeds of new species of rhododendron, Cawdor descended to the Tsangpo to see the falls that Kinthup and Bailey had referred to in their reports. “I could see nothing in the way of a fall,” Cawdor wrote in his cloth-bound journal. “There was rather a big rapids hereabouts, going down in steps but nothing more—I took a photograph of it—It was possible that I did not get to the right place for the falls, I had some difficulty in making them understand what I wanted.” Either way, Lord Cawdor was not overly impressed by the prospects. “The Tsangpo is now merely a foaming torrent,” he wrote, “a beastly greenish color.”

  I asked Sherab and the other porters about the falls below the monastery and Sherab told me that hunters and ambitious pilgrims still visited them to cleanse themselves of accumulated sins. All the porters were eager to go. So were Ken, Jill, and Eric. As we prepared for the descent to the Tsangpo a strange feeling came over me, and I remained behind. The lama Shepe Dorje had mentioned in his account a nearby cliff with a golden waterfall representing the site of union of Dorje Pagmo with her consort. He described a red-colored image emerging from the rock and additional waterfalls like “silk threads” associated with Ekajati, the one-eyed protectress of Tibetan Buddhism’s highest teachings. Thermal springs were said to emerge from the snout of a nearby glacier with beds of crystals that Shepe Dorje and his retinue had shared as offerings.

  Hoping to follow in Shepe Dorje’s footsteps, I wandered alone into the gnat-filled swamps below the monastery and headed for a band of cliffs streaming with water that formed a wall at the southern end of the bog. Bloodred blossoms of Rhododendron irroratum blazed out from the mist. In this “sky-covered dense forest,” Shepe Dorje wrote, “the tree leaves are marked with seven, eight, and sixteen spoked chakras and double-crossed vajras”—the strange venation of the Rhododendron maddensi that Kingdon Ward had mentioned in his notes.

  This was no paradise, however. Leeches fell from the trees and climbed up from the swamp. Clouds of gnats flew into my eyes. Shepe Dorje had described this plague of insects in sobering detail: “This area is full of blood sucking leeches . . . and there are also swarms of poisonous insects. They make sounds like small bells. . . . When darkness falls, they sound like monks praying in a large hall.”

  I walked on through dense mist, inhaling gnats and surrendering my body to the leeches. I thought of the Mahasiddha Naropa, who had nearly been consumed by them during his initiation.23 Even our porters viewed them with a certain respect: “They only suck out the bad blood,” Sherab had insisted. The band of cliffs I was headed for seemed to recede farther into the distance as I often had to double back because of impenetrable thickets and knee-deep mud. The swamp began to seem more like hell than than any immanent paradise, and I finally gave up. With a torn poncho and blood-soaked legs, I headed back to camp and retreated into my tent. There I plucked off leeches and regretted that I had not gone with the others to the falls.

  Soon, Ken and the others returned from the river. Due to high water they had been unable to get through the tunnel in the cliff. Apart from a distant view of Kinthup’s Falls, which appeared, as it had to Cawdor in 1924, as merely a torturous rapids, they saw downriver to t
he massive spur of Namcha Barwa jutting into the Tsangpo which Breashears and Wiltsie had found no way around. The porters had completed their pilgrimage and were now standing restlessly around a feeble fire. They wanted to be paid. “We have only just begun,” I told Sherab. “Our goal is to go through the gorge into Pemako.”

  Sherab was fidgity. “We don’t have enough food,” he said. “We can’t make it.” The porters had obviously determined that they would be better off returning to Gyala rather than facing the unknown dangers ahead. I reminded Sherab that our agreement of exorbitant wages only applied if we continued on around the headwall where Breashears and Wiltsie had turned back. Sherab countered that there was no way around the spur. He dismissed Olmula’s account of the Khandro Sang-La, the Secret Pass of the Dakinis, as the ramblings of an old woman. The notes he had taken, it seemed, had been only to humor me. It now appeared that our porters had never had any intention of continuing on beyond Pemakochung, assuming that having reached this rain-drenched sanctuary we would be only too glad to return the way we had come. Gunn was hopeful. “We must think of safety first,” he said. “Perhaps we should go back.”

  I proposed to Sherab that some of the porters go back to Gyala, leaving their surplus food with those who remained. Sherab immediately retorted that it was unsafe to travel in small numbers through such terrain and that no one would be willing to return alone. I held firm and told him that our deal was off unless we reached the headwall at least and attempted to find a way around or over it. I reassured him that we would be exceedingly generous if we managed to get to the other side and continue into Pemako. It began to rain and the porters retired to their makeshift shelter to discuss their options.

  As I held an umbrella over the open fire, Ken stirred noodles into a stainless steel pot inherited from his father. Gunn ate one of his tins of black fish, casting the empty can into the forest. The porters were anxious. Eating fish brings bad luck in Tibetan belief and they blamed our Chinese liaison officer’s eating habits for the worsening weather. Gunn, unfazed, retired to his tent to a blow-up air mattress more suitable for a holiday at the beach. Amazingly, he had also carried with him a small blue pillow that he propped above his haversack of tinned fish and our now largely useless permits. “I think we should go back tomorrow,” he said halfheartedly, already resigned to our unfathomable resolve to make it through the gorge.

  Mists descended from the cliffs and enveloped our camp. An owl hooted from a nearby tree. In Tibetan tradition owl-headed spirits are dispatched by Shinje Chogyal to herald misfortune. I drifted to sleep to the bird’s eerie cries.

  THE NEXT MORNING, negotiations continued with a new slant. The porters’ main concern, Sherab told me, was not so much finding a route over the granite spur of Namcha Barwa into the inner gorge, but the much higher snow-covered pass—the Shechen-La—several days farther downriver. As no one had ever followed the Tsangpo into its innermost chasms, they rightly concluded that we would ultimately be compelled to return the way we had come or to cross the Shechen-La into Pemako. None of them had ever been there. No one knew the way. “There are snakes, cliffs, and glaciers,” Sherab said, “and no path of any kind. We could easily die there.”

  Even though our own food reserves were minimal, it was unthinkable that we turn back and the uncertainties about the route ahead added significantly to its mystique. On the other side of the spur lay an area called Shekarlungpa—the Valley of the White Crystal. It was there that Bailey had been abandoned by his porters and where Kingdon Ward and Lord Cawdor had “lost” four days, as if having stumbled into another dimension. Shepe Dorje’s party had searched there for the Hidden Forest of the Dakinis revealed to him in his dreams. Local spirits continually possessed the Kudanpas, or spirit mediums, who traveled with him. Khamtrul Rinpoche had spoken of a cave in Shekarlungpa said to conceal a key to Pemako’s innermost heart and had dreamed of being transported there by ethereal muses. Farther downriver beyond where any explorers had reached was the area that Bailey had referred to as “one of the last remaining secret places of the earth, which might conceal a fall rivaling the Niagara or Victoria Falls in grandeur.” Whether or not those innermost gorges would reveal such wonders, it would certainly offer a glimpse into what Kingdon Ward had written of as “the hidden heart of the Himalayas.”

  After much persuasion, Sherab agreed to send two porters back to Gyala. The nine remaining men agreed to continue as far as the headwall and to search for the hidden path described by Olmula. If possible, we would then descend into the trackless jungles of Shekarlungpa. As they had no guns with which to hunt, Sherab asked for the climbing ropes so that they could set snares along the way to supplement their meager rations. It was raining heavily and we spent the day around the camp. Hordes of leeches converged on us from the saturated earth. We moved no farther than a shallow stream where we attempted to wash. At meal times we took turns holding the broken umbrella over a damp and struggling fire. The smoke offered partial relief from the clouds of gnats.

  BEFORE LEAVING THE RUINED MONASTERY on May 5, the porters lit a pyre of fir boughs and prayed toward an ominous peak on the northern bank of the Tsangpo that they held to be a subsidiary abode of Dorje Traktsen. For the porters, negotiating the terrain ahead had less to do with strength and determination than with aligning oneself with this temperamental entity. We set out in rain through swamps and marshy undergrowth and descended 700 feet to the banks of the Tsangpo. Following faint trails left by migrating takin, we reached a deep, frigid torrent called the Talung Chu that streams down from the glaciers of Namcha Barwa. The porters sat down abjectedly on the rocks. Gunn was hopeful that we would now turn back. “There is no way across,” he insisted. In a fit of exasperation I grabbed one of the porters’ apches, their long machetelike knives, and began hacking at a large tree. An hour later we’d cut down two tall poplars and crossed to the other side.

  We dried out on the far bank, where sulfur springs bubbled from rank pools along the shore of the Tsangpo. The river was wild and furious, with twenty-foot troughs and vast waves cresting into the sky. The whole area reeked of sulfur. As Shepe Dorje described it in his journal: The waves from the river resound with Ha Ha Hum Hum and Hang Uang, pounding against each other and crashing into rocks. This valley is called Talung, the upper and lower parts . . . smell of brimstone. We reached the bank of the river and crossed on a fallen tree trunk. A great rock rose at the water’s edge like the skin of a tiger. On it were self-manifested images of a jewel, the syllable “AH,” and golden fish. Other rocks were embossed with lattice grids and eyes of wrathful deities.

  We soon reached a larger torrent, the Sanglung Chu. It emerged from a glacial moraine visible through the forest. Two trees that had been uprooted in a flood had fallen across the water and were lodged in place by boulders, and we crossed the river without incident. The forest on the eastern bank was dense and dripping, and we followed meandering takin trails to the edge of the Tsangpo where more sulfur springs oozed from the rocks. After some distance, the lead hunters spotted a herd of takin on the opposite bank. Lord Cawdor had seen these primordial-looking animals there on his journey with Kingdon Ward. “I had a look at one through the glass,” he wrote in his journal. “It is a fabulous beast—about the size of a small cow with long shaggy hair; blackish on the back and reddish on the sides. It has horns that bend sharply and go straight back. Its head is much like a sheep.”

  There were signs of takin ahead of us as well. Excited at the prospect of fresh meat, three of the porters set down their loads and bounded ahead to set snares. Long before the advent of guns, Pemako’s hunters snared their prey by rigging nooses made from woven bamboo along the takins’ customary trails. In our case, the porters made do with our nylon climbing ropes. By the time we had caught up with them, they had herded a female takin and her two calves into the Tsangpo. One of the calves was swept into the rapids and lost downstream over a small falls, but they managed to lasso the two others
with the climbing ropes and dragged them bellowing onto the rocks. The river was deafening, echoing off the cliffs above and swinging wildly to the north around the rock headwall which Breashears and Wiltsie had attempted to traverse. The bull takin—its snout bulging and short thick horns sweeping back over its head like those of an African gnu—appeared suddenly on the cliff face. With a final look over his shoulder at his doomed family, he ascended diagonally what seemed to be a smooth granite wall and disappeared into the jungle.

  The porters skinned and gutted the two takin and began roasting their flesh on wooden racks which they built amid the boulders along the banks of the Tsangpo. We pitched our tents in a clearing above. Disturbed as I was by the killing, I knew that it was necessary. Without additional food, the porters would not have been able to continue. Sherab later climbed up from the river with his arms full of meat. Don’t worry about the takin, he said. They are ter (dharma treasures) of Padmasambhava. When they are killed, Sherab insisted, their lha, or life-force, spontaneously reincarnates in Yangsang Né, Pemako’s mystical sanctuary. He showed us a small perforation in the tip of one of the takin’s horns. It was through this hole, he said, that the takin’s soul was ejected. To eat the meat of takin here, Sherab said, is to receive the blessings of the hidden-land. “If we hunt elsewhere it’s sinful,” Sherab said, “but in Pemako it’s different,” the beyul’s unique attributes freeing them, at least in theory, of any adverse karmic repercussions.24

  Hunters have always had an ambiguous role in the opening of hidden-lands. Despite their life-taking vocation, they have often discovered routes into beyuls’ interior realms. In Pemako’s oral tradition, hunters who have followed the tracks of takin and not returned are often said to have stumbled into Yangsang, although none come back to indicate the way.