The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  AFTER THREE DAYS, the storm abated and we set out across the fresh landslides that had formed around our bivouac site. Buluk, one of the hunters, drove the end of his matchlock into the mountainside, balancing himself under a swaying basket of blackened pots, ropes, and climbing gear supported only by a fraying tumpline of woven bamboo. Behind me, another hunter, less stable on his feet, chanted mantras as he crouched down with his hands against the steep, eroding slope. As we moved across the landslide, scree slid out from beneath our feet—a continuous cascade of rocks, crystals, and frozen snow tumbling downward into the depths of the Tsangpo gorge, hidden below us under veils of mist.

  The hunters searched for the hoofprints of the takin, but the torrential rain had washed most of them away. By following the line of least resistance, we picked up the trail again and followed it across a series of ridges and ravines. At one point, Tsering pointed down into the mists and said that from a ledge below one could see two of the waterfalls that he had told us about.

  Ned adamantly wanted to continue on ahead to catch up with the phantom herd of takin. Hamid and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to scout the route that had eluded Ken and the Gillenwaters the year before. We convinced Ned that the thundering waters would provide a compelling background for the film, even if he could only shoot them from high above. Begrudgingly, he agreed to make the side trip.

  We wove our way down through a tangle of twisted growth along a spur that dropped precipitously toward the yet unseen river. Steep cliffs flanked the sides. As the drop steepened we lowered ourselves from moss-covered branches and after more than an hour we reached a sloping ledge perched approximately 2 ,000 feet above the Tsangpo River. Holding on to thick rhododendrons, we peered out over the edge and looked a quarter mile upriver to the first of the waterfalls that Tsering had described. A wide curtain of green-gray water poured over a ledge that was bisected in the middle by a protruding granite block. Judging by the spur descending from Gyala Pelri and the photograph taken by Kingdon Ward in 1924, we determined that it was the waterfall that he and Cawdor had seen only from upstream, known ever since as Rainbow Falls.

  Directly below us, and hidden from KingdonWard’s vantage point on the wall above Rainbow Falls, was a larger cataract that surged through a narrow breach between opposing spurs of the gorge. Doubling back on itself, the Tsangpo plummeted down into a grottolike alcove, but our view was foreshortened by being perched directly over the drop and it made it impossible even to guess at the waterfall’s height. Despite its magnificent setting, we were fairly sure that the falls below us were well under 100 feet high, which meant, sadly, that it was not the long-sought Falls of the Tsangpo. If it was more than 100 feet high, then Kingdon Ward’s conclusions had been premature. We were resolved to find out either way.

  The hunters had never descended lower than the ledge to which we now clung like the narrator in Poe’s short story “The Maelstrom.” The falls were still thousands of feet below, but the surging waters resounded off the overhanging walls on the opposite side of the gorge. Even had we been able to discover a route to river level at this time, we had no equipment for measuring the waterfall’s height. And we had made a commitment to journey there only in October with Ken and the Gillenwaters. Ned shot footage of the two waterfalls but was eager to climb back up to where we had left our packs and to resume our quest for the takin. “Unless we catch up with this herd,” he said, “we won’t have a film.”

  Tsering too wanted to leave the ledge as soon as possible. “Takin don’t go there,” he said. “And humans going there could anger the protector spirits.” He looked up at the towering cliffs of Dorje Pagmo’s citadel.

  I asked about the door into Yangsang Né. “It’s no use,” he said, “unless a qualified lama performs the appropriate rites; it would just be an impenetrable veil of rock and water.”

  We began the long climb back up to where we had branched off from the tracks of the takin. I looked back: the plume of mist that rose from the base of the falls made it look more like a fountain. Whatever the waterfall’s actual height, there was an air of mystery about the place, and I looked forward to returning in the autumn when we would try to find a route down to its base and continue afterward through the gap.

  As we made our way back through the gnarled jungle and hung from vegetated cliffs, Buluk offered to carry Ned’s movie camera, which he’d bumped against innumerable rocks. Ned wouldn’t relinquish it, and it became increasingly battered, to the point where he wondered whether its focusing mechanism was still intact. Further darkening Ned’s mood, he had scratched an expensive Baume & Mercier watch that he had bought shortly before the expedition. Hamid had commented at the outset that the watch seemed more suitable for a black tie dinner than the inner depths of the Tsangpo gorge, but Ned had insisted on wearing it.

  Close to dark we reached a small waterfall pouring down through cliffs to a level spot where Tsering had told the others to set up camp. No one was there. We found fresh footprints leading up a steep embankment, following takin tracks into the jungle. Night was upon us, but we had no choice but to follow the footprints up the narrow ravine. We called out into the darkness but heard no reply. In pitch darkness, we began to fashion a makeshift bivouac for ourselves beneath rocky, moss-covered boulders, but as we did we heard distant voices and, eventually, with only a single, fading flashlight, we made a hazardous descent to a snowfield where the Sherpas had set up a precarious camp. We crawled into our tents and disappeared until the morning.

  THE NEXT DAY we followed the takin tracks farther upriver and away from the gap. They seemed to be headed toward a high pass on the eastern flanks of Namcha Barwa.

  “Where are these animals!” Ned shouted, irritated that we could not keep pace with the elusive beasts. Although takin most closely resemble the African gnu, they are distant relatives of the Arctic musk ox. Shaggy and powerfully built, they climb cliffs as sure-footedly as mountain goats. A Tibetan folktale accounts for the takin’s odd appearance. A saint named Drukpa Kunleg entered a remote Himalayan village and demanded a goat, which he ate in one sitting. Still hungry, he demanded a cow, and just as quickly finished it off. He then took the head of the goat, placed it on the carcass of the cow, and slapped it on its rear end to send it off to graze, thus accounting for the takin’s goatlike head and bovine body.

  We emerged out of the tangled undergrowth and crossed snowfields until we reached a series of ledges where the hunters traced the takins’ tracks to the bottom of a near-vertical eroding cliff. The takin had disappeared over its crest.

  The unscalable band of cliffs continued above us as far as we could see. Below, the slope plunged vertically into the depths of the gorge. It was already late afternoon, and the hunters, who seldom balked at the extreme terrain, said that the takin had gone too far and that we couldn’t follow them over the cliffs. Ned was in near despair. “We’ve come all this way for nothing,” he said. “That damned waterfall. If we hadn’t lost all those hours, we might have reached here before the takin disappeared over that cliff !”

  The loss of the takin disappointed us all. But it was the days that we had spent pinned to the side of the gorge in a raging storm and not our side excursion that had led to the takin’s outdistancing us. Tsering now had more immediate concerns. He said that by following the takin’s hoofprints we had descended far from where he had instructed the porters to set up camp and that we would have a difficult time making our way up through the ravines and watercourses. We looked up and saw cliffs, landslides, and steep unstable slopes. With no more chance of stumbling into the herd of takin, Ned packed away his camera.

  The climb up the side of the gorge was treacherous. In near darkness we crossed an enormous landslide with nowhere to anchor our ropes. At one point Ned lost his footing and began to slide toward the cliff below us, rocks plummeting beneath him into an incredible void. Had he not grabbed on to the small tufts of vegetation that grew up through the mud, snow, a
nd scree, he would have catapulted down to his death.

  Ned cursed continuously as he picked his way across the collapsing mountainside. As his knees shot up and down like a sewing machine, Tsering and Buluk climbed below him in their thin-soled Chinese sneakers and placed his feet on small protrusions of rock and earth that held for only a few seconds, forcing him to move rapidly across the shifting surface of the slide.

  We eventually reached the far side of the landslide. From the ridge beyond, we could see in the distance the small fires where the Sherpas had set up camp. We made our way through the darkness to shallow caves recessed beneath looming boulders.

  That night around the fire, Tsering lamented that we had not been able to catch up with the migrating takin. In the warming weather, they had crossed early over high passes into the regions south of Namcha Barwa. The jungle there is so dense that we could never follow, Tsering said. Even if we found them, we would never be able to carry the meat back out. Perhaps on another trip, Tsering continued, we could travel that direction. The weather had improved and, in their perception that Pemako’s guardian deities are arbiters of meteorological events, the clearing weather indicated that if we were not favored, we were at least tolerated by the local spirits.

  Ned filmed Tsering as he sat by the sparkling fire and recounted how in their own local mythology, the takin will eventually lead them into Yangsang Né. Following their footprints in the snow, they will find a still-hidden pass and cross it into the promised land.

  Without footage of the takin, the film was incomplete. But Hamid already had in mind how he would supply the missing shots with his own Bolex camera. In October, he would go off alone with one or two of the hunters, he said, when the takin return to the Five-Mile Gap. My own reveries turned more toward the hidden waterfall. Although I doubted that it would turn out to be more than 100 feet high, and I had no clue as to how the mythical door might actually open, I had faith that if we could reach it something momentous would be revealed.

  The Exploration Council

  DURING THE TREK DOWN THE PO TSANGPO with Ned Johnston and Hamid Sardar, I had met Steve Currey, the owner of a wilderness rafting company who was scouting for a major descent on the lower Tsangpo River. After Rick’s failed rafting venture in 1993, Outside magazine had determined that “The Tsangpo Gorge . . . given its abundance of Class VI rapids, will likely never be run. . . .” But Steve Currey was set on running the section of the river below its confluence with the Po Tsangpo. He had enlisted two top kayakers—Scott Lindgren and Charlie Munsey—who launched their boats near the bridge in Pelung and ran several miles of the Po Tsangpo before the raw power of the waters drove them back to shore.

  As we watched them from a decrepit footbridge spanning the river, Tsering Dondrup commented on the boats’ usefulness. “If I had one of those, I would use it to cross the Tsangpo at Hugudurung,” he said, referring to a river-level cave in the depths of the Five-Mile Gap. Herds of takin cover the slopes on the opposite bank, he said, but neither he nor any of the hunters had any way of reaching there. He claimed to be the last in his village to know how to make a boat by burning the centers of fir trees and lashing them together with bamboo cords.

  After the kayakers pulled out of the thrashing waves, they continued on foot toward the confluence to scout the area where a Japanese kayaker, Yoshitaka Takei, had perished on the Tsangpo in November 1993. If feasible, they would put in at the junction of the two rivers and make a run for the Indian border.

  We did not tell them our own plans of making a film, or of the rumored waterfall in the heart of the gap. We told them that we had come to continue our research into the cultural history of what, for Tibetans, is a promised land. Oddly, Currey’s Chinese liaison officer had remained at the road head in Pelung, and Hamid and I translated for them as they negotiated rates with their porters and told them where they wanted to go. We left them when they crossed a bridge leading west to Mondrong, exchanging addresses before parting.

  Two months later—in July 1998—Currey called me in Kathmandu. He told me he would be making a presentation at the National Geographic Society, seeking sponsorship for an expedition on the lower Tsangpo River. Knowing that I had traveled through the villages of the lower gorge, he asked if I would show slides and talk about the indigenous peoples living “in the deepest and most remote valleys on Earth,” in the hope that this would help persuade National Geographic to sponsor his expedition. He also asked if I would organize the land portion of the expedition if the grant went through. I had already planned to come to the United States the following month, and I agreed to meet him in Washington, D.C., on August 10.

  I took the Metroliner from New York City and, late at night, checked into a hotel a few blocks from the National Geographic Society. In the morning, a few hours before our scheduled presentation, I reviewed Currey’s prospectus: a $577,863 bid for full funding of an ambitious, multipronged expedition that would “make history by rafting/kayaking the Lower Yarlung Tsangpo gorge (which includes the first-ever descent from China to India).” I was ambivalent about involving myself in such an expedition. Whereas Currey was primarily interested in the area below the confluence, I was focused on what lay above. But I was curious as to how National Geographic would receive our presentation and grateful that he had asked me to participate.

  Assembled in a small auditorium with a panel of senior National Geographic personnel, Currey began the presentation with video footage of Scott Lindgren maneuvering his kayak through the seething froth of the Po Tsangpo. I followed with slides and spoke of the region’s cultural and religious history—the legacy of the beyul.

  It felt odd speaking of these matters in National Geographic’s hallowed halls, but my audience was attentive. Somewhat embarrassingly, it quickly became evident that the society had no interest in sponsoring The Currey Expedition, because they were already sponsoring a kayaking expedition on the Tsangpo that coming fall. But several on the review board had taken a great interest in my slides that revealed a cultural dimension to the Tsangpo gorge that they had not been previously considered. “Why haven’t you contacted us before?” asked Rebecca Martin, director of National Geographic’s Exploration Council (now known as the Expeditions Council). “When are you planning to go back?”

  I told her that I hadn’t been interested in publicizing the area before making a thorough survey and that only recently had I learned of a route into the legendary gap. I said I would be returning to Pemako in October to attempt to make my way through this unexplored section of the gorge. Purposefully, I mentioned nothing about the waterfall that we had seen the previous May.

  “That’s exactly the kind of trip the Exploration Council sponsors,” she told me, and encouraged me to submit an application. She would call a special meeting, she told me, and the council would decide quickly.

  I had always been wary of obligating myself to a third party and in the past had rejected sponsors who desired something from me in return. The Exploration Council struck me as different and seemed genuinely committed to promoting worthy journeys that would lead to National Geographic’s stated mission—dating back to 1888—to increase and disseminate geographical knowledge of the planet. I would be returning to Nepal in early September to lead a Himalayan Kingdoms tour for the Smithsonian Institution, and I agreed to complete the application before I left the States.

  As I would not be returning to Washington, Rebecca Martin urged me to meet with members of the kayaking expedition that National Geographic had already agreed to sponsor. The team proposed to make the first attempt to kayak through the chasms of “Tibet’s forbidden river.” The expedition leader,

  Lieutenant Colonel Wickliffe W. Walker, an ex-Special Forces officer, had previously applied to another institution, the Henry Foundation for Botanical Research. By coincidence, I had met Susan Treadway, the foundation’s director, a year earlier when she was staying at my parents’ home in Bedford, New York. She had
told me then about Walker’s plan to kayak through “the Earth’s deepest canyon” and asked me whether I thought it would be feasible. Sections of the gorges are definitely runnable, I told her, but to attempt its innermost chasms would be suicidal. My words haunted me as I drove to the home of Harry Wetherbee, Walker’s partner in organizing the expedition.

  A former state department employee, Harry Wetherbee had privileged access to restricted maps and high-resolution satellite photography. A StairMaster stood prominently on the living room floor in front of the fireplace. Wick Walker was out of town, but Harry’s wife, Doris, and Tom McEwan, one of the expedition’s four world-class kayakers, were present as we pored over their state-of-the-art imagery. When they reached the area of Rainbow Falls, they planned to portage along the Tsangpo’s left bank, Harry told me.

  I found it curious that the satellite imagery gave little indication of the actual terrain: even Kingdon Ward’s photographs from 1924 show sheer cliffs rising from the left bank of the river and I knew from our foray earlier that year that what Harry proposed would be impossible.6 Without revealing what Tsering had told us of hunters’ trails through the region of the gap, I told of them of a crucial escape route should they need to exit the gorge farther upstream: the pass across from Pemakochung that Ken, Ralph, and I had gazed down from in 1996.

  I submitted my grant application to the Exploration Council on September 4. I titled it “Secrets of the Tsangpo” and revealed for the first time what Hamid and I had learned on our previous expedition: The culmination of seven previous trips to the Pemako/Tsangpo gorge region in southern Tibet, this expedition will document what has been referred to as “the missing link”: the last unexplored section of the world’s deepest gorge and a blank spot on the map of world exploration. . . . Traveling with Tibetan hunters who, until now, have guarded this region from inquisitive outsiders, the expedition will document for the first time the topography of the Tsangpo gorge between Rainbow Falls and the confluence with the Po Tsangpo. . . . The expedition will take accurate measurements of all waterfalls . . . and shed light on a region that has confounded geographers and fueled the Western imagination for more than a century.