The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  Only a few passes lead through the mountains into the hidden-lands beyond. The year before, we had come in May, and all routes into Pemako were blocked by snow. No one had crossed over the passes since the previous autumn. When we left Bhakha Tulku at his residence above his monastery, he had held a silver amulet box containing sacred relics on the top of our heads and said prayers for the success of our journey. We had continued on to Pomi to try our luck. Wandering through the markets, we met a Lopa hunter who had crossed over the snow-covered ranges from Pemako to sell a leopard pelt. Some of the proceeds of the sale had visibly gone to Chinese alcohol, but he agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to guide us into Pemako over a high pass called the Gawalung-La7 that he claimed to have crossed several days earlier. We enlisted a crew of road coolies to carry our provisions. They were Chinese and had little idea where the Lopa hunter was leading them. They carried our gear on bamboo poles that they slung across their shoulders. Near the top of the pass, an avalanche of collapsing cornices had forced them to bivouac, and they caught up with us the next day, partially snowblind.

  We were now headed for a pass farther east on the Kangri Karpo range—the left breast of Dorje Pagmo—that would connect us with the route to Kundu that Bhakha Tulku had followed in 1956. It was getting dark, and we’d driven past a small village called Dashing, the “field of arrows,” looking for flat ground on which to camp. Although jeep tracks clearly continued deeper into the forest, the drivers suddenly refused to proceed any farther, insisting that we had come as far as vehicles would allow. The one Monpa who claimed to know the route over the Dashing-La pass insisted that the road continued for another day’s march. A raging feud ensued between our drivers and the elderly Monpa, who eventually fled into the bushes. One of the drivers had threatened to kill him for imparting such inconvenient facts.

  Using the Land Cruisers’ headlights for illumination, we set up our tents in the middle of the jeep track, while Gunn, Zang, and Cookie, Gunn’s personal cook, went back to Dashing village to arrange for additional porters. They returned the next morning, ravaged by bedbugs after sleeping on old Tibetan carpets. Surly and demanding additional pay, the drivers proceeded another ten miles on the rough logging road, struggling through a deep forest of towering spruce and tsuga hemlocks until the track petered out into yet denser forest.

  After unloading duffel bags, bamboo pack baskets, and sacks of provisions from the Land Cruisers and truck, the Sherpas sorted out the loads. Beyond the eight Sherpas and Tibetans who had come with us from Kathmandu, we had hired twelve additional porters, seven from the crew of Monpa road workers and five from the villages around Bhakha. Gunn’s porters from Dashing had brought horses and mules. They would go only as far as the Chimdro valley on the far side of the Dashing-La pass, they said. They would return with dried chili peppers to sell in the market in Pomi.

  As we were weighing loads, a small green jeep appeared, lurching up the final stages of the logging road. We feared it was the police from Pomi telling us we would have to return. Instead, a portly lama wearing a sun hat with a red rose ribbon emerged from inside the car. He was accompanied by two attendants, the elder one twirling an enormous prayer wheel. They installed themselves in a clearing in the forest and brought out wooden bowls, tsampa, and a thermos of tea. After eating, the lama approached us and introduced himself in Tibetan as Kawa Tulku, Reincarnation from the Snows. He was the abbot of Neydo Gompa, a Nyingma monastery in Riwoche, several days’ drive to the north. His whole life he had heard about Pemako and the sacred mountain Kundu Dorsempotrang, he said. It was now the Tibetan Year of the Wood Boar, and he had decided to undertake the pilgrimage to the lands of the pig-headed goddess, Dorje Pagmo. Neither of his attendants knew the route, and as the trail to Kundu is notoriously rugged and ill defined, we agreed to travel together. The senior monk from Bhakha monastery had not been allowed to come with us, but we now had a reincarnate lama along in his place. This time there was no illegality; we would simply be following the same itinerary.

  The porters told us that it would take us four or five days to reach Chimdro, and from there another seven days to Kundu Dorsempotrang, figures that roughly agreed with Bhakha Tulku’s account. All additional efforts to establish distances and time had been in vain. Popular Tibetan wisdom maintains that Monpas cannot count, and it’s true that their estimates had varied so greatly as to be virtually useless.

  WE WALKED LESS THAN AN HOUR to a campsite in a large meadow at 11,000 feet. The seven Monpa porters laid claim to a dilapidated wooden shelter and burned several of its floorboards to brew their tea. Kawa Tulku ensconced himself in a blue and yellow Chinese dome tent. When we went to greet him, he was sitting in the tent door, slicing chunks of meat from a shank of dried mutton and drinking chang. He smiled broadly, and the Gillenwaters referred to him ever after as the Jolly Lama.

  Hamid and I asked him about Pemako’s nés, or sacred places. There are many nés in Pemako, he said, and he planned to take his time visiting as many as he could. After Kundu, he would continue on to the monastery of Rinchenpung and stay some weeks there in retreat. Afterward, he would cross the Tsangpo and leave Pemako over the Doshung-La, the Pass of Sharp Stones.

  I asked him about the location of Chimé Yangsang Né, Pemako’s “innermost secret place.” He looked up with an air of surprise. Yangsang is in disputed territory between India and China, he said protectively. No one can get permission to go there. He returned to his shank of wind-dried meat. I pointed out that permission can hardly be given for a place that no one has yet located. He changed the subject to the weather. One of the Monpas who had been loitering nearby announced confidently that it wouldn’t rain for fourteen days. As Pemako is notorious for its incessant rainfall, the proclamation was extreme enough to be taken seriously. Kawa Tulku laughed and returned to his leg of mutton.

  Hamid and I took our leave at nightfall and joined the others in the dining tent. The horses that would carry our gear over the pass had been put out to pasture. The tinkling of the bells strung around their necks merged with the roar of waterfalls that poured from glaciers, lost now in darkness above the Dashing-La pass.

  Despite the Monpa’s proclamation, we awoke on August 4 to rain drumming on the roofs of our tents. After loading the horses, we headed into a deep, mossy forest of hemlocks and firs, framed above by high, glacier-covered peaks. Kawa Tulku walked slowly through the rain with unrufflable composure. The green dye in Christiaan’s Hapsburg hat poured down his head in thin rivulets. The weather slowly cleared, but we knew that the rains would be heavier on the other side of the pass. Monsoon clouds race unobstructed up the Tsangpo valley from the Bay of Bengal, drenching the mountains and swamps of Pemako and turning it into a place that Kingdon Ward described as having only two seasons: “wet and more wet.”

  We stopped at midday by a foaming river where the Monpas brewed their salted tea, and we ate our packed lunches of yak cheese and unleavened bread. Afterward, we climbed steeply for 1,000 feet to a crude wooden shelter used by pilgrims and traders before they cross the Dashing-La into Pemako. The altimeter showed 12,850 feet. A great wall of rock rose behind us to the north. Black clouds streamed over a barrier of mottled glaciers to the south and east. We set up our tents in a boggy meadow as the porters spread plastic sheets on the floorboards of the rough lodge.

  The Sherpas had built a smoldering fire, and we came in from the rain to dry our clothes. Large bags of tsampa were tied to the rafters; food caches of local traders in a place where community loyalties discourage theft. Kawa Tulku had set up his tent on wide planks beneath the dripping roof. Oy had collected orchids along the trail and set them out to dry. “They’re very advanced plants,” she claimed, and went on to describe the various chemicals that they exude to attract insects and birds. The whole flower, as Oy described it, was an elaborate snare of sex and death.

  Kawa Tulku had watched Oy inspecting primroses and other flowers along the side of the trail. With wire-rimmed g
lasses perched on her nose, she had pressed samples between the pages of her journal or placed them carefully in Ziploc bags. And now she’d laid out others to dry by the fire. Kawa Tulku asked what qualities the flowers had and whether they were medicinal. It turned out he too had come to look for plants, albeit of another order.

  Like an Eastern incarnation of the intrepid plant collector Frank Kingdon Ward, Kawa Tulku intended to scour the forests of Pemako for rare flowers; not blue poppies for beautifying distant gardens but plants described in the Pemako neyigs that could heal the body of disease and catalyze physiological, psychological, and even spiritual transformation. Kawa Tulku had brought a copy of the treasure-text that the Terton Dorje Thokme had discovered in the temple in Powo. The terma offered descriptions of five “nectar-bestowing” plants that the lama hoped to identify on his journey.8

  AS WE CARRIED ON with our heady talk of plants, Christiaan returned from the glacier. He’d crossed a stream of melted ice to check out a furry mass he’d seen on the opposite bank, spurred on, he said, by thoughts of newspaper headlines such as new yorker discovers yeti. What he found was a five-foot carcass of a female Ursus thibetana—an Asiatic black bear—curled on her side and rotting on the ice.

  Immediately, a large party of Monpas set out for the glacier with the lama and his young monk attendant trailing behind. Oy, Hamid, and I followed afterward along a river that issued from beneath a vast snow field, the remnants of a large avalanche earlier in the year. The snow seemed firm, and we crossed the submerged river to where the bear lay curled up on its side, presumably having been swept away in the avalanche and only now emerging with the summer thaw. As the Monpas dragged the frost-stiffened bear into an upright position, the lama performed a rudimentary powa ceremony to ensure the safe transit of its soul. Then the Monpas set upon it with knives, cutting a long gash down its chest and reaching in with their hands to extract the gallbladder, a prized organ in traditional Chinese and Tibetan medicine. They then cut off the paws. In a few weeks they would be able to sell them in one of the small Chinese garrison towns. By the time it reached the market in Hong Kong or Guangzhou, a dried gallbladder would fetch as much as $500.

  The bear was rotting, yet the porters began dividing it limb from limb. They extracted the heart and liver and set them aside on the ice. Thinking that they were nearly done, we headed back to camp for dinner. An hour or so later, the Monpas filed by the dining tent with huge chunks of bear meat slung across their shoulders. A great feast ensued inside the shelter, although the Sherpas would have no part of it, speculating that the bear might have been poisoned, in which case its flesh would be toxic. We were more concerned that the meat was rancid, although Hamid pointed out that hunters often hang game up for weeks to give it “noble rot.” The Monpas had no worries; the meat was tsok sha, manna from heaven. While the lama sat by the fire reciting mantras, they smoked the meat on racks of branches that they built over the flames. They placed the bear’s head in the rafters like an eerie totem.

  We retired for the night under a half moon. Dark clouds billowed over the ridges from Pemako as smoke streamed through the walls of the shelter and rose into the sky. If our porters survived the bear feast, we would be in Pemako by the following afternoon. The pass ahead of us seemed increasingly like a portal. Moonlight bathed the lower slopes, and from its upper levels, concealed in mist, came the rumbling sound of avalanches.

  WHEN WE AWOKE ON THE MORNING of August 5, the porters were still roasting the last of the bear. Some of them had stayed up the entire night. With 100 pounds or more of dubious meat added to their loads, they climbed slowly toward the pass. One of them had tied the bear’s head to the top of his bamboo basket.

  We ascended steep snowfields, the remains of the avalanche that had swept away the bear. We then began a steep climb toward the pass itself, switchbacking across small streams, gullies, and bands of rock.

  While the Monpas carried the bulk of our supplies, the Sherpas carried our personal gear. A sixty-two-year-old Sherpa named Ongel shouldered the dry-bag containing my sleeping bag, pad, spare clothing, and film. He had been on six Everest expeditions and innumerable climbs throughout the Himalayas. Small, with a leathery face and piercing black eyes, his mountaineering skills would be crucial in avoiding circumstances such as those we experienced the year before on the Gawalung-La when, without Sherpa support, we had nearly lost our entire regiment of porters. Ongel’s most distinguishing feature was a cigarette-sized hole through the middle of his two front teeth, the more poignant since even at these altitudes he smoked like a chimney.

  When the Sherpa clans originally migrated from eastern Tibet, they followed prophecies of a hidden-land in the vicinity of Mount Everest, or as they know it, Chomolungma. The heart of the beyul has yet to be found, Ongel said, but all of Solu-Khumbu, the region they settled in, is thought to be part of it. They found fortune there. Although Sherpas number only a few thousand in the Nepalese population of twenty-two million, their standard of living is one of the highest among the kingdom’s many ethnic groups, due largely to their hazardous work on mountaineering expeditions.

  AT THE TOP OF THE 15,000-FOOT PASS, dark rain clouds obscured the view into Pemako. A horse caravan emerged from the mists carrying tsampa and chiles from the Chimdro valley. Accompanying them was a Chinese man dressed in a khaki field suit. We learned that he was a zoologist named Qui Minjiang, who had spent the last month studying Chimdro’s growing tiger problem. Pemako is the last place in Tibet that has tigers, Qui said. He claimed that elsewhere in China they are on the verge of extinction, with no more than twenty to thirty scattered over a large area. The Khampas of Chimdro hunt them illegally, he claimed, not for their skins or bones, which are considered medicinal, but because they are the major threat to their livestock.

  Until the Khampas settled in Chimdro in the early twentieth century, Qui explained, the valley was a prime habitat for tigers. They preyed on takin, red goral, and other wild species that inhabited the valley. With their natural habitat usurped by humans, they now preyed on the Khampas’s horses and cattle. The previous year, marauding cats had killed 15 percent of Chimdro’s 947 head of cattle. Qui feared that with human retribution, the tigers’ numbers would dwindle. His stated mission was to ensure that they did not, even if it meant darting them and relocating them by helicopter into the wilderness to the south—the area of Kundu Dorsempotrang.

  It was raining heavily now and the porters had all gone ahead. We parted company with Qui at the top of the pass and descended into the clouds. After an hour, a lone herder’s hut appeared in the valley below. Approaching it through deep mud and the barking of a fearsome one-eyed Tibetan mastiff, we heard the sound of a drum and bell. Inside the stone dwelling, Kawa Tulku was performing a ritual ceremony to strengthen the life force of the the small family of herders. He sprinkled them with water from a consecrated urn, and afterward they served him yogurt made from the milk of their cattle.

  It was still pouring when Kawa Tulku and his attendants readied themselves to leave. “Come with us,” the older man said, “the trail is uncertain.” We were still soaked from the descent from the pass and we told him we wanted to dry out first by the herders’ yak-dung fire. “It only started raining when Rinpoche came inside,” the attendant said. “Now that he’s leaving, the rain will stop.” We shouldered our packs and headed out into the rain. In less than five minutes, the rain had stopped completely.

  An opening in the clouds revealed a lush valley far below us, a wide stream flowing through its center like a silver ribbon. We descended through thickening fir forests; to the west waterfalls streamed down the faces of moss-covered cliffs. A lone man emerged from below, carrying nothing but a string of wooden prayer beads and a plastic jug filled with chang. When we told him we were headed for Kundu Dorsempotrang, he told us he was returning from there himself. He had cut a trail through the jungle and felled trees to cross the swollen streams, he said. “The way is clear.
You will find the mountain.” He offered us swigs of his elixir and continued upward toward the pass.

  We camped at 12,000 feet at the edge of the stream that we had seen from far above. The ground was wet and spongy, but the weather was clearing. Towering rock walls rose above us into a world of ice and snow. A circle of blue sky hovered above the valley as streamers of diaphanous mist drifted through the trees. The lama, it seemed, was at work. Even Gunn conceded that he seemed to have some uncanny power over the weather. “Every time I’ve been in Pemako,” Gunn said, “it’s been like hell. Now it’s like paradise. We must stay with this lama.” Gunn’s conversion had begun.

  The Valley of Chimdro

  WE STARTED OUT THE NEXT MORNING on a track of rough-hewn planks that led through a thick swamp. The Sherpas had bought rubber Wellington-style boots in the market in Pomi, as had Kawa Tulku, who now set the pace, ambling ahead with an enigmatic smile, mantras spilling from his lips, while above us hung the improbable circle of blue sky.

  The valley of Chimdro lay 4,000 feet below. The mule trail wound through bogs and swamps and crisscrossed a glacier-fed stream overhung with hemlocks and birch. Gunn’s Chinese tennis shoes had begun to decompose in the mud, but he followed the lama closely, convinced that he had some kind of influence over the environment. When he found him resting on a log beside the trail, Gunn asked him to bless a small jade Buddha that he wore around his neck. “I believe in science,” Gunn told me, “but this lama is special. I want to gain something of his power.” Oy marveled that Kawa Tulku’s boots had remained relatively dry, while her own feet were soaked through despite neoprene dry socks and Gore-Tex gaiters.