The Waiting Land

by Dervla Murphy

  15 JUNE

  This morning I awoke to what looked like heaven – a world mistily draped in gentle clouds that completely hid the great mountains and almost concealed the nearer hills. It’s impossible to describe the relief of seeing and feeling this grey dampness; of course the temperature was still about seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit – but what a joy, after the glare of the past weeks, to experience such cool dimness and to find clouds still shielding us as the morning progressed! Then at midday the sun reasserted itself and shone until about five o’clock when (cheers!) the monsoon started – not with any spectacular storm but just as a steady downpour, accompanied by incessant rumblings of thunder and frequent glares of blue sheet-lightning. On my way home from supper at Kay’s house I fell repeatedly on the slippery, flooded road, in the coal-black intervals between lightning flashes that clearly and beautifully illuminated the whole width of the valley; and now the din of heavy rain on the tin roof is so deafening that I can hardly hear myself think.

  I’ve refrained from giving details of the trials and tribulations involved in erecting monsoon huts for the camp – but the number and variety of these trials and tribulations would drive Job to drink. Between Nepalese procrastination and Tibetan laziness the whole operation is taking ten times as long as it should and today it was possible to move only half the camp from badly leaking tents into less badly leaking bamboo shelters. I suspect that in this case the Tibetans’ laziness is a form of passive resistance; these nomads obviously prefer the seclusion of their traditional tent life, however inadequate the available tents may be, to the sort of communal existence they will have to endure in the new shelters – and as someone who values privacy far more than comfort I secretly sympathise with them. Having never experienced the persistent damp of a monsoon season they don’t yet realise that their removal to less unsuitable accommodation is literally a matter of life or death – especially as many of them are already in a weakened condition because of the debilitating heat of this valley and an ill-balanced diet.

  16 JUNE

  Rain was still step-dancing on the roof when I awoke and the room temperature was down to seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit. Today Pardi seemed strangely hushed without the intermittent roar of planes landing and taking-off – life in this remote Central Nepalese village has at least one feature in common with life in Hounslow or Southall! However, as Nepal has a very mild version of the true Indian monsoon it is unlikely that we’ll ever be cut off from Kathmandu for more than a week at a stretch. This morning the rain stopped at about ten o’clock and until it started again this evening the damp heat was rather exhausting – though luckily the sky remained overcast.

  For the past four days I’ve been enjoying two pairs of fish-hawks who have come to live on the wooded precipice over-hanging my swimming-pool. They are falcon-sized, with glorious red-gold plumage, and it is wonderful to watch them swiftly swooping down to skim the surface of the green water, and then rising triumphantly against the blue sky with a silver fish in their talons. Here too I have twice seen a giant blue and silver kingfisher, looking like a tremendous sapphire as he flashes in and out of the water. The valley also has many other types of hawk and a great variety of unfamiliar sweet song-birds, as well as jays, tits, crows, finches, swallows and of course the very important, very ugly scavenging vulture, with its brilliant hooked yellow beak, ungainly walk and unpleasantly avid expression.

  Last week two unusual patients were presented to me in camp – a pair of fledglings whose mother had been killed in the forest by Nepalese hunters and who were then rescued by Dawa, a firewood-gathering Tibetan. There was a certain pleasing incongruity about this great hulking fellow – looking as tough as Tibetans come – when he advanced towards me tenderly carrying these two tiny objects wrapped in a filthy rag. His trouble was that they wouldn’t eat the Bulgar wheat he offered them, so what to do? When I advised insects Dawa carefully put his charges inside his chuba-pouch and hurried off on an entomological expedition – instead of getting on with his shelter-building work. And rather to my surprise the fledglings have survived and are now happily hopping around Dawa’s tent to the delight of his three-year-old son.

  Already I can see that the worst side-effect of the monsoon is going to be a nightly insect-plague. Nepalese shutters have little square ventilation holes near the top and through these fly an inconceivable number of insects, attracted by my lamp. At present the table and everything on it are literally being made to move by the creatures; I have just stopped writing to count eighteen different varieties, from enormous, exquisite moths, bright green two-inch grasshoppers and horny russet beetles, to mosquitoes and winged ants and half-a-dozen weird objects that I can’t even attempt to identify. The combination of buzzes and bangs and whizzes and whines and bumps and drones adds up to quite a din. What is worse, the floor is swarming with big black ants – in addition to my permanent army of tiny red ones – and with cockroaches. I must admit that when sleeping on the floor cockroaches seem to me expendable, though I’m not neurotic about them as I am about spiders. Luckily – almost miraculously – spiders seem to be the only form of insect life not represented in the room at the moment.

  Incidentally, my rats are becoming impossibly truculent – and obviously their mothers brought them up not to eat poison. Last night one of them knocked a zinc bucket off a tea-chest on to my head, so today I have a big lump above my ear; on moonlit nights it is positively depressing to see so many grey shapes scurrying around the room.

  5

  Tibetans on Trek

  18 JUNE – POKHARA

  About a hundred and fifty more bamboo mats are desperately needed to complete the new shelter, but we have already bought all those available in the valley. However, I heard today that it should still be possible to buy some in Siglis, a village two days’ walk from here, so I instructed Chimba to leave at dawn tomorrow morning with twenty-five Tibetans and to bring back as many mats as could be wheedled out of the villagers. I had expected him to rejoice at the prospect of even so short a trek for, like most Tibetans, he has an inborn inclination both to wander and to trade; but he showed an odd reluctance to go to Siglis and on being questioned as to the reason he declared that the track was exceptionally difficult at the best of times and would be downright dangerous now that the rivers were rising. This seemed a fair enough argument, yet it did not entirely convince me. When I enquired further he admitted that there was also a possibility of trouble with the Nepalese in Siglis, where the raiding exploits of Khamba brigands have made Tibetans so unpopular that the villagers would be more likely to attack our party than to trade with them; at which point I suddenly and delightedly saw that here was a perfect opportunity for me to combine duty and pleasure by accompanying the party as a pacifying agent, while getting my first experience of travel in the hills. Chimba at once agreed to organise the expedition if I came too, so tomorrow morning at six o’clock we will all set off together.

  Today I found that the river had risen about five feet during the past twenty-four hours, transforming my placid pool into a frothing swirl of water. I got myself wet by cautiously going in at the edge of the torrent and hanging on to a rock while the water raced powerfully over me; then I pulled myself out, soaped all over and re-immersed for a rinsing-off session. All the time the river was rising fast; while rinsing and dressing I left my soap on a little ledge of rock some six inches above the water and within those few moments it was swept away and the ledge completely covered.

  19 JUNE – TOPRUNG

  This seems a very appropriate name for a hamlet near the summit of a 6,000-foot hill overlooking a deep, narrow valley; but my spelling is purely phonetic and it may be that Anglo-Nepali experts have an entirely different way of writing the word.

  Our early start didn’t come off today, because of persistent heavy rain, and it was seven o’clock before we marched out of camp in a pleasant grey coolness. Then there was another delay, caused by several men disappearing into The Annapurna on some o
bscure business connected with the private trading they hope to do in Siglis, so it was almost eight o’clock by the time we crossed the airfield.

  Siglis is due north of Pokhara, according to my Swiss map of Nepal, yet because of the terrain’s intractability we began our journey by walking more than five miles due south along the valley floor, before turning east for two miles up a broad side-valley. Here flowed an erratic river which we had to ford often, but in spite of a very fast current this was not difficult as the water never came above thigh-level and the bed was of firm gravel. Though this valley is about half-a-mile wide it is not cultivable, being merely a dried-up river-course which later in the season will be entirely submerged, and its stony surface was not appreciated by the barefooted Tibetans. Many of them had started out proudly wearing formidable mountaineering boots, acquired from various expeditions, but soon these unbearably unfamiliar prestige symbols had been transferred from feet to shoulders. Now the sight of so many bare feet on such cruel stones caused me considerable vicarious pain, so I urged a temporary resumption of boots; but this idea was at once rejected and in consequence we made slow progress during the next ninety minutes.

  On either side of the valley rose steep, heavily-forested hills and occasionally we came to hillocks of grass on which a few handsome black cattle were grazing under the care of inquisitive, skinny children. By now the sky was almost cloudless and the heat considerable, so I often lay in the river for a moment without bothering to remove my shirt and shorts – a sensible idiosyncrasy which provoked uncontrollable mirth among the Tibetans. The fact that none of us had ever been to Siglis was giving the trek a faint tinge of adventure. Chimba had spent the previous evening searching for locals who knew the track and discussing it with them – but the Nepalese are not very precise in their directions and now he wasn’t even pretending to be sure of where we went next.

  Near the head of this valley we forded the river for the fourth time and then began to follow one of its tributaries up a steep side-valley, which was cultivated here though later it narrowed to a ravine. At the confluence of the rivers stood three solid Gurung farmhouses and all their occupants, of every age group, were now working at full pressure in the flooded paddy-fields, ploughing them with bullocks in preparation for the replanting of rice seedlings.

  To me such evidence of harmony between Nature and man is wonderfully soothing. During the long hot days preceding the monsoon little work can be done and the people sit about idly enjoying themselves; then suddenly the rains come and overnight the landscape is utterly changed and the whole tempo of life altered to a most urgent activity. Here man, to survive, must co-operate fully with Nature, and it is impossible to see this severe yet dignified work-pattern as inferior to that of an industrial community in which men labour as dully in November as in May, obsessionally conscious of their individual ‘rights’ while remaining stuntedly unaware of themselves as part of a whole. Increasingly one senses a threat to racial sanity in this artificial sealing off of ourselves in a solitary compartment where pride in technological ingenuity replaces the old, instinctive recognition of our links with the rest of creation and our dependence on ‘the gods’. Yet, even if it were possible to go back, any such denial of the good in our civilisation would be still more destructive than the present indiscriminate worship of both good and evil.

  I had lingered to watch the ploughing and now, hurrying to catch up with the rest, I tried to imagine the unimaginable – life in 2065. Probably the most we can hope for is a gradual growth beyond this current adolescent idolatry of man’s omnipotence towards a new, deliberate recognition of the necessity to worship something other than ourselves.

  The paddy-fields all lay on one side of the river – by now I was too foxed up to know whether it was the north, south, east or west bank – and the only path was along the top of a narrow irrigation ditch, now sealed to retain the rain. As we advanced in single file the soft clay often crumbled, sending some unfortunate toppling into knee-deep liquid mud, and every one of the workers and animals was covered from head to foot in this thick dark liquid – which was all very well for the men, who wore only loincloths, but can’t have been too pleasant for the women in their voluminous skirts. The men of our party are wearing ragged gift-parcel slacks or shorts – they reserve their chubas for festive occasions – but the women have not yet discarded the traditional Tibetan clothes. However, six out of the ten girls are dressed in the unusual Dholpo divided skirt, which neither Kay nor I had ever seen among the Tibetans in India; at first glance these garments look like ankle-length gowns, but they are in fact very loose pantaloons which allow great freedom of movement when walking or climbing.

  As we ascended this valley the incline became much steeper and the river swifter and noisier among its tumble of rounded rocks. When the paddy-fields had been left behind I overtook the Tibetans, whose walking pace was apparently geared to that of laden yaks, and soon they were all behind me and I was happily alone in a fresh and lovely world of high, forested cliffs, glinting water and herb-sweet air. Occasionally fifty-foot waterfalls came leaping strongly off the cliffs, and in places the valley broadened enough for the path to wander briefly away from the river’s edge across new green grass between silvery rocks. After about forty minutes I came to another fording place – and now I saw why Chimba had been apprehensive. Here the current was so powerful and the water so discoloured that it was impossible to judge depth and one had to feel with a stick before taking each step, all the time bracing oneself against the force of the water. But this river was no more than fifteen yards wide and I was soon across; the most disconcerting thing during such fordings is the shifting of stones on the river-bed beneath one’s feet.

  I sat on the bank to smoke a cigarette and de-leech my legs while waiting for the Tibetans. Surprisingly, most of the girls made quite a fuss about the fording and it was comical to see those tough nomad youngsters giving an excellent imitation of nervously giggling mid-Victorian ladies whose carriage has broken down on the way to a dinner party. Possibly this display was being put on mainly to attract the men’s attention – though one can see that for non-swimmers such a crossing could be rather frightening. The ability to swim would almost certainly prove irrelevant if one were swept away by a mountain torrent but it does illogically give one an extra degree of confidence.

  Chimba decided to call a halt here as many of the party were already ‘creating’ about being leech infested; this was the Tibetans’ first monsoon so these pests were unfamiliar to them. Foreseeing several septic legs by the time we got home I hastened to explain that never must a leech be forcibly detached from the skin; either salt or a lighted cigarette are the only answers. As we have nothing but rock salt with us – and salt is in any case too expensive to waste on leeches – I went around from leg to leg with my cigarette, assuring the Tibetans that contrary to appearances they were not going to bleed to death within half-an-hour. Pasang, one of the more argumentative men, pointed out that he had already pulled his leech off and that his leg was not bleeding – nor did he appear convinced when I explained that this was exactly the point, and that bleeding was essential after the wretched creature had been removed. I didn’t even attempt to explain that the bleeding was so copious only because leeches inject an anti-coagulant before beginning their meal.

  Soon after this rest-halt we left the river and began the toughest part of today’s walk – a climb to the crest of a 6,200-foot hill. (My natural impulse is to call this obstacle ‘a mountain’; but by local standards it is of course a mere molehill.) For much of the way up – through dense forest – the track was not a track but a stone stairway; so if you can imagine ascending a two-mile stairway with very deep steps you will have some idea of how we felt on the crest.

  By now it was apparent that these Tibetans have become seriously debilitated after six months in an unsuitable climate on an inadequate diet. Though travelling light and bred to walk far in rough country they made very slow progress at this stage,
and for their sakes I’m thankful that on the way home, when they will (we hope) be carrying heavy loads, the journey will be mostly downhill. I waited for them at each porter’s-rest – those stone squares, usually built around the base of a large tree, where a man can sit on one ledge and rest his load on the ledge above. The comfortable fixing of heavy and often unwieldy loads can be quite complicated so these rests are designed to take the weight off the body without the removal of the load. Many of them must be centuries old, for on the shiny stone seats one can see where the impress of countless buttocks has worn into the surface.

  On the crest of the hill I again walked briskly ahead – and then suddenly came to one of the eeriest spots I have ever known. Here the path overhung a deep ravine, and where it turned right to climb the next ridge a tiny Hindu shrine, covered with stale bloodstains, had been built in the shadow of a gigantic, fantastic tree. The weird distortion of this tree gave it such an unnerving personality that spontaneously one thought of it as a demon in disguise; and to add to the unreality of the scene the monster roots were growing around a colossal black rock, about a hundred feet high and thirty feet wide, that had become detached from the mountainside and was poised unnaturally above a sheer, thousand-foot drop. These complex roots were as thick as a man’s body and they clasped the rock with a nightmarish, writhing ferocity that produced an extraordinary effect of repellent beauty. Even on this brilliantly sunny afternoon the place was merely twilit and in the absolute silence of the forest the steady, quiet dripping of water off the rock sounded ridiculously, but definitely, sinister. I am not given to psychic reactions and perhaps, had I been forewarned, I would have had my shield of scepticism in place and felt no more than interest at observing a curious natural phenomenon. But as it was this corner of the forest frankly scared me and I’m not surprised at the erection of a shrine to propitiate the spirits of the tree and rock, who obviously have extremely unpleasant dispositions. I rang their heavy iron bell three times as a precautionary salutation and its curiously amplified echoes were still resounding as I climbed towards the crest of the next ridge.