The Heart of the World

by Ian Baker

  Less than 100 yards after setting out from the ledge we crossed a landslide of shattered rock and scree, a result of the tremor ten days earlier. Buluk cut steps with a primitive adze as a cascade of small stones catapulted over the cliff below. Our heavy loads made the crossing treacherous, and a false step or displacement of shale would have sent one of us hurtling over a 100-foot cliff onto the only slightly less precipitous slope below. There were no trees or boulders large enough to use as an anchor for the rope. Our Sherpa cook, hired at the last minute and a pale substitute for Pemba, muttered prayers or curses—it was hard to tell which—as he pawed anxiously at the crumbling slope of shiny, mica-studded igneous and metamorphic rocks.

  We forged on over fresh landslides as rocks continued to catapult over the precipice. The Tsangpo lay more than 2,000 feet below us, the roar of the river rising up between the walls of the gorge and drawing us into its depths. We entered a steeply tilting zone of scrub oak and ripe blueberries, until—two hours beyond Darup—Buluk suddenly indicated that we should begin the descent.

  The scrub oak and rhododendrons gave way to a pathless forest interspersed with moss-laden cliffs. We slipped, clambered, and floated through interlinked ravines dense with hemlock, magnolia, and rhododendrons. Waist-high ferns obscured the ground and, in places, we broke through deceptive layers of sphagnum moss, catching ourselves in a maze of limbs and tree roots.

  We soon entered an almost impenetrable tangle of rhododendrons and barberry, clinging to slopes that without vegetation would have sent us sliding down the steep ravine and over the cliffs below into the Tsangpo, still hidden from our view by the dense foliage. We angled south and, where the trees abruptly ended at a sheer 1,000-foot cliff, we arrived at the vantage point that Buluk had led me to last May with Hamid and a disconsolate Ned Johnston, eager to resume the hunt for the takin.

  We secured our packs to obliging rhododendrons perched near the edge of the precipice and gazed down at Rainbow Falls that, less than half a mile away, channeled the gray-green flood of the Tsangpo into a sleek wave that poured over a rock ledge divided in the center by an outcrop of silvery granite. Beneath the falls, the Tsangpo dissolved into a sea of mist and spray and resumed its implacable flow. In less than a quarter of a mile, it crashed against the base of white cliffs that drove it suddenly due west. There, walled in by towering walls of rock and with the looming pyramid of Dorje Pagmo soaring directly above, lay the second falls that the hunters claimed was larger, although none of them had ever been closer to it than we were now.

  Ravaged walls of rock and vegetated slabs tilting at impossible angles lay between us and Rainbow Falls, the waterfall that Kingdon Ward and Cawdor had seen from upstream and had named after the bands of color that arced through its spray. From his vantage point 200 feet above the river, Kingdon Ward had estimated the falls to be a maximum of thirty to forty feet high, despite having only seen its crest and the cloud of mist rising from its base. Until this point, Kingdon Ward’s measurement of Rainbow Falls had never been challenged or confirmed.

  Ken sighted the expedition’s laser range finder on the shimmering cascade, but the falls were too far away to get an accurate reading. So was the waterfall that surged in a hidden pocket of the Tsangpo thousands of feet below us.

  No discernible route led toward the river, and interlacing tree limbs formed an imposing barrier. But they also provided a means of descent: where we could not cut our way through the vertiginous terrain, we clambered down as if on a ladder. After two hours of precipitous descent, in which we lost sight of the river, we reached an exposed ledge roughly 1,000 feet above the Tsangpo. From our new vantage point, Rainbow Falls appeared as a smooth, majestic wall of water, plumes of spray rising into the air and blending with the sinuous cascades that streamed from the steep rain-polished walls of the gorge.

  Ken took out the expedition clinometer—a sextantlike instrument that calculates heights by measuring the angle of incline—and aimed it at the face of Rainbow Falls. By measuring the angle of incline from its base to its crest, our surveying instrument revealed a height of seventy-two feet, nearly twice what Kingdon Ward had estimated seventy-four years earlier. Rainbow Falls was a far more significant feature of the Tsangpo than previously suspected. More important, it raised our hopes for the waterfall below. If the hidden drop a quarter mile downstream was even higher, the legendary Falls of the Tsangpo might ultimately live up to its original billing. We plunged back into the jungle with added fervor and resumed the descent for the waterfall.

  As we climbed lower, the falls disappeared again from sight, but its roar rose up through the trees ever more loudly, reverberating off the walls of the gorge. We entwined our arms around sinuous tree limbs and swung down through a hanging forest of rhododendrons and weeping pines. Much of the time we slid our way down and we often doubled back when our line of descent ended in sheer drop-offs or impenetrable thickets.

  Bryan’s attempts to capture our descent and the goal ahead of us reminded me of an allegorical science fiction film by Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker. The film chronicles the journey of three men through a mysterious and forbidden territory in the Russian wilderness called the Zone. In the Zone nothing is what it seems and the landscape continually shifts and rearranges itself, as if an unknown intelligence were thwarting all attempts to reach a mystic sanctuary said to lie at its center and where all desires are mysteriously fulfilled. As the expedition unfolds, the protagonists’ determination unravels as they question the consequences of realizing their deepest wishes.

  The roar of the river increased until it filled our heads like white noise, and the forest thickened. We were soon morassed in a dense tangle of Himalayan barberry, a thorny flowering shrub that Kingdon Ward introduced to the British Isles. With Buluk and Jayang cutting a way through the thick underbrush—their inverted goral skin tunics protecting them from thorns—we slipped down the steep slope, using vegetation to keep us from plummeting into the void. At a point where the incline lessened, we peered through trees and watched the Tsangpo narrow into a roaring tide that crashed against the cliffs below us. We made our way down a series of vegetated rock ledges, overhung by jungle. Suddenly we came up against a vertical cliff that plunged below us into a green abyss.

  We could find no way down and the sun had long since disappeared behind the 5,000-foot obelisk of Dorje Pagmo. It was too late in the day to bring out the climbing ropes, so, at 7,200 feet above sea level, we settled in for the night in a grove of weeping pines on a ledge overlooking Rainbow Falls. Cliffs towered above us, and plumes of white mist billowed up through the trees from the unseen waterfall still far below us.

  The hunters slept around a smoldering fire of rhododendron logs, their bare feet open to the embers. For them too this was a night of mystery and anticipation.

  The power of our walled sanctuary infiltrated my dreams, and I passed the night in journeys through half-submerged cities and dream-lit caverns. The words of Henry David Thoreau came to me in my sleep: “It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves.”

  EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING, November 8, one of the Monpas appeared at my tent to tell me that they had spotted three red goral on the cliff beyond our camp. Jayang and Buluk had already headed out with their rifles. Along with giant pandas, tigers, leopards, and takin, red goral are on the list of Class I protected animals, but they are still hunted in remote parts of the Himalayas for their meat and skins. Those of us still in camp watched transfixed as Jayang and Buluk made their way across the mountainside. So far, the short-horned antelope-like creatures seemed unaware of the imminent danger.

  A granite slab sloping precipitously toward the Tsangpo separated them from the hunters.

  From our vantage point approximately 230 yards away, we watched with dismay and fascination as Jayang took aim at the largest of the two males. The tawny beast reeled backward off the edge of the cliff and fell 600 feet down into the Tsangpo. The other male goral sca
mpered up the slabs and was lost to view. The hunters got a clear shot at the female, who tumbled to a small ledge where several small cedars prevented her from falling over the edge.

  For the next hour we watched a riveting drama as Buluk and Jayang made their way across the wet slabs and finally reached the sloping ledge where the goral had fallen. Jayang tied it across his back, and he and Buluk began their precarious traverse back across the rock face, twice slipping and nearly following the first of the gorals into the crashing waves below. When they reached the safety of the forest, Buluk shouldered the load and they soon arrived back in camp. Dropping the freshly killed goral on the matted grass as if it were a heavy stole, they sat down by the fire and, without ceremony, drank their morning tea.

  Before the Monpas skinned and dismembered the dead goral, Lama performed a powa ceremony to guide its lha, or life spirit, to a better place. In the Buddhist worldview, enlightenment infers liberation from the tyranny of self-centered existence, including all hope for a heaven beyond the here and now. But on the way, it’s believed one can incarnate in paradisiacal realms where the desired unity with cosmic forces can be more easily achieved. It’s to these Elysian realms that the hunters consign their prey and banish any guilt they may harbor for breaking one of Buddhism’s cardinal laws: not to willfully take another’s life. The hunters claimed that the spirit of the goral that had fallen into the Tsangpo would be carried downstream to Bodhgaya, the place of Buddha’s enlightenment in northern India. At that hallowed site, they assured us, it would attain release from the cycles of suffering and pain. I thought of Doug Gordon, whose body disappeared without a trace thirty miles upriver. I could only hope that he had slipped into those same exalted currents.

  Once Lama completed the soul-releasing ritual for the dead goral—and to appease any Buddhist misgivings—the hunters began an older rite and quickly skinned the carcass and stretched the red-brown hide on a frame of bent saplings. Buddhist sentiments aside, their subsistence hunting was far less harmful to the earth’s ecosystem than cattle ranches in the Amazon or wheat and corn production in the United States. They would ultimately use the cured skin to make leather bags or sew two hides together to fashion one of their traditional sleeveless tunics, clothing themselves with the gifts of the forest. They sectioned the flesh and Jayang gently placed the goral’s head and treasured organ meats on the open fire. When it was only lightly cooked, he handed me a piece of the liver. Whether its soul had been released or not, I felt a pang of deep remorse for the loss of so magnificent an animal that had plied these inner realms of the gorge long before the arrival of Homo sapiens. As the goral’s flesh metamorphosed within my cells, I hoped to absorb something of its intimate knowledge of this older and more enduring world.

  WITH THE GORAL’S HIDE stretched out on saplings by the smoking fire, we prepared for our descent to the waterfall. In historical and geographical terms, the significance of the hidden falls beneath us depended entirely on its height. Until we reached the waterfall’s base and took conclusive measurements, our speculations on the matter would be no more than hopeful conjectures.

  Taking only a minimum of gear, we started down the cliff at the far end of our camp, lowering ourselves down broken ledges by holding on to small saplings and to the roots of larger trees that projected from the mountainside. Below the cliff, we coursed through slanting thickets of bamboo and bracken and eventually emerged onto open rock. The walls of Dorje Pagmo loomed above, vertical displacements of the earth’s crust at this fault line between prehistoric continents. A mantle of fresh snow graced her upper slopes while black cliffs cross-hatched with moss-covered ledges fell sheerly toward the Tsangpo like a latticed apron. The falls thundered below us, still hidden from our view. We followed their sound and the column of mist that swirled against the dark walls of the gorge to the edge of a precipice and, from there, gazed down at last into the turbulent heart of the hidden waterfall.

  The jade green flood of the Tsangpo funneled into a breach approximately fifty feet across and transformed into a sleek wave of what looked like polished air. Surging over the precipice and intersected by rays of sunlight, the river freed itself of all semblance of form and dissolved into incandescent foam as it crashed against an intermediary rock ledge seventy feet below and leapt forth again in arcs of light-filled spray. Filling the air with light and water, it resumed its descent until dissolving into a maelstrom of seething waves, fountaining up against the polished walls of the gorge.

  “The falls!” Ken shouted in genuine rapture and—at Bryan’s prompting—“the glittering goal of so many explorers!” Our voices drowned in the tempest at our feet. The air buzzed with ions. The falls were colossal, a massive curtain of foam and light hurtling between sheer granite walls. To gaze into the waters was to stare into the face of impermanence, waves and particles blurring by one after the other, beyond what the mind or eye could register. In ancient Greece, Heraclitus had proclaimed, “You can’t step into the same river twice,” and the prospect of measuring this mass of jetting water suddenly seemed absurd to me. Yet such was our stated mission and the task now at hand.

  A protruding buttress obscured the waterfall’s full expanse. To view its entirety, we would have to descend the overhanging cliff directly below us. After securing two 150-foot climbing ropes to a weeping pine, I heaved them down toward the falls. I then strapped on a climbing harness, attached a Petzl descender, and launched myself out over the overhang. My feet swung in open space as I rappelled down to a large sloping ledge that we had seen from above. I had planned to tie off at the ledge to await the others, but I could not resist running out the length of the rope to see if we could reach another vantage point lower down the wall.

  I rappelled another twenty feet down, buffeted by the spray of the falls, and entered a realm where there was little distinction between air and water. The wall was wet and smooth, flecked with glistening feldspar, but where the rope ended I reached a foot-wide shelf where I tied off the descending device and turned around into the face of the waterfall. The view was astounding: the mass of the Tsangpo transformed in the narrow breach into a great glittering curtain, dissolving into fractal jets and crashing into the cauldron below. Translucent spray exploded over my head and streamed down my spine. To immerse oneself in the “power, velocity, vastness, and madness [of water] affords one of the no-blest lessons of nature,” wrote Ruskin, the great eighteenth-century observer of natural processes. And I watched, mesmerized, breathing in the oxygen-rich waters and lost in the vast display of liquid becoming—the organic wholeness that D. H. Lawrence had once called “the wave that cannot halt!”

  If there was a door through these waters into the fabled Yangsang, I imagined it to be some deep realization of the dynamic, implicit order hidden within appearances, some existential still-point in the chaos of crashing waters. “As you penetrate the flowing and not-flowing of water, the ultimate character of all things is instantly realized,” states a Buddhist sutra.

  Then all words and thoughts vanished in the flood. I looked up and saw Ken and Bryan far above me at the top of the cliff. They could not see the tiny shelf of rock that I was standing on, and I indicated by sign language that I would have to climb back up to the sloping ledge above me. I clamped ascenders to the wet rope, stuck my feet into slings of nylon webbing, and jumared back up to the sloping ledge. After tying into the end of the rope with a locking carabiner, I waited for Ken to descend with the measuring devices.

  Bryan was not going to miss this critical moment. Although he had never rappelled before, his background as a competition surfer gave him a certain confidence in unnerving situations. After Ken unclipped from the rope, Bryan lowered himself down to the ledge, his video camera securely looped around his neck.

  Our expedition clinometer, which measured angles of incline, would be of no service until we stood at the base of the falls. Ken unstrapped the digital range finder and focused it on the curling wave at the top of th
e falls and afterward on the white froth at its base.

  “I can’t get clear readings,” Ken said. “The dial keeps bouncing.”

  Ken handed me the range finder and I tried to focus it on the avalanche of water at the crest of the falls and on the churning sea beneath: the differential should have given us an accurate reading of the height. But the waterfall had no fixed form or boundaries. Its clouds and spray offered only a flux of transient images, and the troughs and waves at the bottom caused the digital screen to fluctuate chaotically, as if it were measuring the waterfall’s transience, its absence of abiding form.

  Waterfalls are transient phenomena even from a geological point of view. Their erosive power gradually wears away the rock beneath them, until they have transformed themselves into rapids. Accordingly, existing waterfalls are relatively recent features of the earth’s landscape. Niagara Falls came into existence only twelve thousand years ago, during the Pleistocene, or glacial, epoch, when the continental ice sheet melted back and exposed an escarpment of Niagaric dolomite rock, underlain by softer shales and sandstones.12