The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  For their midday meal, the porters stopped by a stream cascading down from the glaciers above the Dashing-La. They started a steaming fire with damp branches and placed a blackened kettle on the flames to brew their tea. With their long knives they carved chunks from the dismembered bear, but it was becoming clear already that some of the meat was rancid; a nun from Bhakha who had attached herself to our column was retching in the bushes.

  As we sat amid the thick horsetail grass that lined the river and feasted on our more prosaic fare of yak cheese, bread, and dried apples, the Monpas boasted that the bear’s gallbladder would fetch them as much as 3,000 yuan (nearly $380). They disclosed that after hunting trips, they had sometimes mixed the gallbladder of a bear with that of a pig. If it’s done well, they claimed, no one can tell the difference.

  The trail continued along islands in the braided stream, switching back and forth between the banks on fallen logs. We entered a dense forest of firs, sycamore, and maple. At 10,000 feet above sea level it transformed into an almost impenetrable thicket of towering bamboo. It challenged the imagination to think of the intrepid Khampas who first entered this jungle in search of a promised land, yet shortly before dark and 2,000 feet lower, the forest opened into a vast field of artemesia framed by magnolia trees, tall cliffs, and tiered waterfalls. A reddish glow infused the sky as a rainbow arched across the valley to the south.

  We approached a small village with sloping wooden roofs and stopped to make camp. A woman appeared carrying a bamboo basket filled with fodder. Last night a tiger had killed one of her dzos on the same spot, she told us. The villagers had carted away the carcass.

  SETTLERS IN CHIMDRO had cleared and partly cultivated the once densely forested valley floor and driven local wildlife onto the steep mountainsides where tigers could no longer hunt them. The tigers preyed instead on the Khampa settlers’ horses, pigs, and cattle. The Tibetans were hesitant to kill the tigers, not only because they were protected under Chinese law, but because they considered them to be manifestations of Pemako’s protector deity, Dorje Traktsen. According to the Khampa woman who had wandered into our camp, Chimdro’s tigers have never killed a human being and few of the villagers had even seen one. They come like ghosts, she said.

  At these lower altitudes, Pemako’s notorious leeches and clouds of flying insects posed a more immediate threat. When the woman returned to the village, we retreated into our tents as a thunderstorm illuminated the green walls of forest that sealed the valley on all sides.

  In the morning we headed into the village to look for Kawa Tulku. Half a dozen wooden houses, each encircled by white prayer flags and raised above ground level on posts, sat among small plots of barley and corn. Hedges made from stacked thorns had been built to ward off monkeys. Dzos and mithun cattle roamed the surrounding fields. Enormous spiderwebs stretched across the paths and from the houses’ wide, overhanging eaves.

  We found the lama in the home of the village headman, eating tsampa and drinking whey. The headman, Orgyen, had been telling him about a dzo that he had lost to a tiger two nights earlier. “Each year, every household in Chimdro loses at least one horse or head of cattle to a tiger,” Orgyen said, but in the last three years he alone had lost forty of his livestock to predatory cats. The previous year—1994—Chimdro’s tigers had killed 113 cattle and 29 horses, and this year the rate had been even higher.9

  In response to our prodding, Orgyen told us that he had been born in Pemako to Khampa parents who had arrived there in the first years of the twentieth century as followers of the lama Jedrung Jhampa Yungney, who had unearthed a guidebook to Pemako called Clear Light from a cave in eastern Tibet. The lama had led them on a search for Chimé Yangsang Né that came to naught. In a lengthy story with familiar echoes, Orgyen told us of the peregrinations of this group of devout Tibetans buffeted about by outside forces, from hostile tribes to border disputes between India and China.10

  From oral history, the conversation turned suddenly to the weather. Strange atmospheric phenomena had occurred in the three days prior to our arrival, Orgyen said. The only time that rainbows appear in the sky while the sun is shining and while, at the same time, it is raining is when someone dies or when a great lama is coming, he maintained. And now also when Americans first come to Chimdro, he added jokingly. Kawa Tulku, perpetually amused, said nothing and continued to eat his tsampa and whey.11

  However welcome we might have felt, we were eager to continue on toward Kundu Dorsempotrang. Gunn arrived at Orgyen’s house and expressed concerns about our permits. He was clearly nervous about the small Chinese military garrison in Gutang, where a bridge crossed to the other side of the Chimdro Chu River. Orgyen told us of a cable that stretched across the Chimdro Chu several hours’ walk upriver from Gutang. If we crossed there, he said, we could avoid the Chinese altogether. On the other side, a gorge leads up through dense forests to the Pungpung-La, the pass leading toward Kundu. I asked Orgyen about finding someone who knew the way to the mountain. “The young people from Shingke have all left,” Orgyen said, “and we’re too old now to go. You might find someone in Samdrup, the village above the cable.”

  As we prepared to leave, Kawa Tulku announced that he would be staying in Shingke for several more days, waiting for some monks from Kham. I couldn’t blame him. If his idea of pilgrimage involved any modicum of solitude, it would definitely have been compromised by our presence. When I told Gunn, he was clearly disappointed. Zang refrained from comment.

  WE FOLLOWED THE VALLEY WESTWARD through dense broad-leafed forests and open grazing land where dzo and dzomos foraged warily, perhaps aware of the perpetual threat of tigers. After several hours we reached the village of Samdrup. We set up our tents on a shelf of ferns below the site of a ruined temple dedicated to the lineage of Taksham Nuden Dorje, the “tiger-skirted” treasure-revealer who had opened routes into Pemako in the latter part of the seventeenth century. The altimeter showed 7,500 feet. Below us a cable stretched across the seething river that we would have to cross the next day to begin the ascent toward Kundu Dorsempotrang.

  Gunn confessed that our permits did not technically cover the way ahead. No one in our entourage knew the way to the sacred mountain, and our attempts to find a guide in Samdrup had been unsuccessful. As in Shingke, the villagers claimed to be too old for such a pilgrimage. You’ll have to find someone in Gutang, they said.

  Gunn had hoped to avoid the authorities in Gutang but, apart from our pressing need for a guide, the porters he’d hired in Dashing-La had refused to go any farther, and he’d been unable to recruit others in either Shingke or Samdrup. He would find someone in Gutang who knew the way to Dorsempotrang, he promised, cross the bridge, and meet us on the other side of the river the following day. It seemed a reasonable plan.

  Another problem remained. Before leaving Shingke, Kawa Tulku had warned us that as an outsider, meaning one unsympathetic to Buddhism, Zang would cause obstacles on the pilgrimage to Kundu. He urged us to find some way of divesting ourselves of him. We had already decided to send three porters down the Chimdro Chu with food supplies that we would need when we reached Medok in the lower Tsangpo valley. I proposed to Gunn that Zang accompany them to guard the loads. Unfortunately, he failed to take the bait. “We must take Mr. Zang,” Gunn said anxiously.

  After Gunn and Zang left for Gutang, we sat outside our tents as a rainbow appeared over the gorge leading toward Kundu Dorsempotrang. Not only were we inspired, but it gave the people of Samdrup—who were encountering Westerners for the first time—confidence that we were not unwelcome, weather patterns often being viewed as a direct expression of the mood of local protector spirits.

  Equally auspicious was the arrival of three Tibetans who had gone with us the year before on our journey to Medok. They had heard news about us in Pomi and, traveling without loads, had taken only three days to catch up. Puntsok, a Khampa, wore a black woolen chuba, a threadbare straw hat, and a boar’s tusk and amule
ts around his neck. The two others were from Powo. One, Chimé Gompo, had a distinctive scar across his face. His friend wore his green cap at a jaunty angle. With a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he bore a faint resemblance to Humphrey Bogart. Given our difficulties finding porters in Chimdro, their arrival was as welcome as it was unexpected. But they had no more idea than we did about the route to the mountain.

  Crossing the River

  WE AWOKE ON AUGUST 8 to clouds and drizzle. By 8 a.m. it had turned into a steady rain. A group of villagers appeared at my tent door and told me that Chinese soldiers were on their way from Gutang to prevent us from continuing to Kundu Dorsempotrang. “Go across the river quickly,” an old man said. “Once you’re across the river, they won’t follow.”

  The cable stretching across the Chimdro Chu was intimidating; it sagged across several hundred feet of deafening white water, all headed for the Tsangpo and afterward into the Brahmaputra and the Bay of Bengal. Last year the cable had broken, the villagers informed us, and a Chinese soldier had fallen into the river and drowned.

  Despite the ominous tidings, we were eager to cross as quickly as possible. We decided to send the Sherpas first and ourselves last in case we had to negotiate with local officials. A one-eyed Khampa led us to a precarious staging platform of rotting wood built between two trees. He placed a notched section of rhododendron wood over the top of the steel cable and tied leather straps around Pemba’s torso and neck. We attached a 180-foot climbing rope to the dubious apparatus so that it could be hauled back across for the next person.

  The climbing rope was too short, and we had to add three lengths of local hemp and a long strip of leather in order to stretch it across the river. As the rope would otherwise dangle in the water and be pulled downstream by the force of the rapids, the Monpas made a loop of woven saplings that held the rope above the full force of the white water. With all in place, Pemba slid out over the void, waves leaping around his ankles as he hauled himself and the first load across the river.

  It took the better part of the day to relocate our entire crew and all of our supplies. The Chinese soldiers had failed to materialize, although we could see figures on the other side of the river and worried that they had instead gone with Gunn to accost us on the opposite bank. There was no way of knowing, as there was only one-way communication across the rope bridge. We waited out of sight on the banks of the Chimdro Chu, where one of the Monpa porters busied himself plucking fish from the eddies with his bare hands.

  When our turn came to cross the cable, we backed up the notched piece of rhododendron with carabiners and nylon webbing, despite the one-eyed Khampa’s protestations that it would create too much friction. He had stood for hours on the rotten staging platform like an executioner at a gallows. He placed the leather straps and ropes over my head with a lavish grin, and I slid out over the waves and hauled myself up to the opposite bank.

  Gunn was waiting on the other side. With Zang’s assistance, he had pacified the authorities in Gutang, found several porters, and recruited a slightly manic Khampa named Yonten who claimed to know the way to Kundu Dorsempotrang.

  We set up camp above the river amid towering ferns and sorted through piles of what seemed increasingly like extraneous gear. The Sherpas, dressed in expedition hand-me-downs, played cards in the green nylon cook tent. Gunn, Cookie, and Zang formed a separate camp with meager Chinese pup tents and a stove that had lost its base on the way across the river. Gunn’s large inflatable air mattress—the kind one might use for lounging around on a lake—was perhaps their most impressive piece of equipment.

  The porters from Bhakha, with amulet boxes around their chests and swathes of green canvas wrapped around their legs to ward off leeches, had encamped under one of our surplus tarpaulins. The Monpas camped deeper in the ferns, where they feasted on the now definitively rotting carcass of the bear and made beds of matted foliage. The slightly demented nun hunched over her prayer book while sitting on a throne of deep green ferns. In terms of technological development, our extended camp was a study in evolution. But any thought of romanticizing the Monpas’ ease with their environment was undercut by the sight of two of them retching up the putrifying bear meat.

  Over dinner Hamid regaled Oy and the Gillenwaters with tales of his Caspian homeland. “The cloud forests of the Caspian are very much like Pemako,” he told them, “they’re full of snakes, leopards, and wild boar.” He elaborated on the region’s charms: “The mountains there are so remote that during Persia’s medieval period, they served as a base for the renegade Assassin sect. The Assassins’ teachings were a blend of Neoplatonism and Sufi mysticism, and were much maligned by Islamic historians, who claimed that the sect’s leader fed hashish to his disciples as a foretaste of paradise to come, and then sent them out to terrorize and kill his enemies much in the manner of Japanese ninjas. But the Persian historian Juvaini reported that his forest fortress had contained a great library with unique manuscripts in various languages including the works of many Greek philosophers, until they were put to the torch by Mongol invaders in the thirteenth century.”

  SITTING BY THE SHERPAS’ FIRE, the guide that Gunn had enlisted to lead us to Kundu, Yonten, described the route ahead of us, pointing up the gorge and naming the various passes, swollen rivers, and swamps that we would have to cross en route to the mountain. He spoke of the tigers that we would likely hear but never see and the poisonous snakes that we would be lucky to avoid—Russell’s vipers and king cobras. But he evaded all our attempts to determine how many days it would take us to actually reach there. “The trail grows over every year,” Yonten said. “No one from Chimdro has gone this year. We will have to cut our way through dense jungle.”

  Further complicating matters, Yonten explained that Kundu could not be approached directly. Before climbing to the mountain’s inner circuit, tradition dictates that pilgrims complete a multiday circumambulation of eight lakes that surround its base. This Chi-kor, or outer circuit, extends into disputed territory between India and China, Yonten claimed—the legendary region of the Lo-nag, or Black Savages.

  The rumours of the trials ahead circulated throughout the camps. The porters from Gutang had demanded 100 yuan a day, and the ones from Bhakha now demanded the same. It may have been a pilgrimage, but along with religious merit the Tibetans wanted to accumulate as much cold, hard cash as possible.

  Other than the dubious claims of the drunken “pilgrim” whom we had met on his way toward the Dashing-La, we had no sense about whether the trail to Kundu would be passable. We had no accurate maps, and our guide, Yonten, was unproven. Christiaan suspected that he had never actually been there. We were poised at the threshold of the inner beyul. The trees beyond our sea of ferns were silhouetted like brush strokes against descending mist. The forest above was shadowy and silent, uninhabited for hundreds of miles. I divested myself of leeches and crawled into my sleeping bag; the dark sinuous forms inched across the nylon netting of the tent door. Before falling asleep I thought of the Buddha’s words in the Dhammapada regarding crossing the river of Samsara for the boundlessness of Nirvana: “Leave the past behind; abandon all thoughts of the future, and let go of the present. You are ready then to cross to the other shore.”

  The Gates of the Beyul

  ON AUGUST 9 WE LEFT THE REFUGE of the fern garden in heavy drizzle. Within minutes of setting out several of us had taken different paths on what turned out to be no more than animal tracks through the dense undergrowth. We called and whistled to each other and wandered in circles trying to find the actual trail. Yonten, the guide, was nowhere in sight.

  Not only was the way blocked by almost impenetrable foliage, but the ground—when we could see it—was writhing with leeches. Blind but heat-seeking, the blood-sucking worms extended themselves from wet leaves and dropped down on us from the tree limbs, tunneling through layers of clothing until they found bare skin. It was impossible even to count how many we m
ight find on our bodies at any one time.

  Several varieties appeared, from ones so small they could hardly be seen to four-inch-long tiger leeches. We stopped every few minutes to divest ourselves of as many of them as we could—dozens at a time—but, as Christiaan exclaimed, they seemed to be raining from the trees. Even the most hardened of the porters raced through the ferns as if speed alone would keep the leeches from adhering. “They’re like wrathful guardians testing our resolve,” Christiaan shouted. I told him the stories of Dulshuk Lingpa, Chatral Rinpoche’s father-in-law, who, in similar circumstances, had urged his fellow pilgrims to let the leeches have their fill of blood until they fell off of their own accord, swollen to several times their original size.

  Ever the naturalist, Oy spoke about the anesthetic that the leeches inject before engorging themselves on mammalian blood. “That’s why you don’t even feel them at first,” she said. “But it wears off and that’s why they itch terribly once they’ve fallen off.” They also inject an anticoagulent, causing the wounds to bleed profusely for several hours after they’ve been removed. Oy referred to them as marvels of specialized evolution and commented that Thai villagers sometimes use them to purify their blood.

  YONTEN HAD STUMBLED UPON some semblance of a trail and called out from up above. There was no sign of any recent human passage, and the porters in front had to hack through tangled undergrowth and overgrown ferns with their long machetelike knives. We followed as best we could through the jungle, parting the wet, leech-filled foliage with bamboo staves. It was a purgatory worthy of Dante. We followed a ridge through serpentine moss-covered rhododendrons and entered a realm of dense bamboo that in places, we had to crawl through on all fours. The Monpas pointed out several spots where bears had feasted on the stalks.