The Snow leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

  The trail moves westward over Jaljala, crossing wet tundra set about with purple gentians and a pink-belled heath. Then the first ray of sun in days strikes the harlequin feathers of a hoopoe, and I smile. Like many of the foothills birds, Upupa is also a bird of Africa, but I saw one much more recently—last month, in fact—in the mountains of Umbria, in Italy. Because of its sun-ray crest, the hoopoe is a "solar bird"— doubtless an omen of a change in weather—and in Sufi mythology its breast mark is sign that it has entered the way of spiritual knowledge:

  I [the hoopoe] am a messenger of the world invisible. . . . For years I have travelled by sea and land, over mountains and valleys. . . .

  We have a true king, he lives behind the mountains. . . . He is close to us, but we are far from him. The place where he dwells is inaccessible, and no tongue is able to utter his name. Before him hang a hundred thousand veils of light and darkness. . . .

  Do not imagine that the journey is short; and one must have the heart of a lion to follow this unusual road, for it is very long. . . . One plods along in a state of amazement, sometimes smiling, sometimes weeping.11

  The snow cone of Great Dhaulagiri, five miles high, rises from the clouds behind and is quickly misted over; though far away, it fills the whole northeast. Ahead, a valley of yellow maples descends gently to the west, on one side a wall of firs, on the other a rampart of bare rock; the valley stream sparkles with shifting storm light, attracting three species of the superb Asian redstarts (Phoenicurus), which are related to the nightingale. "This is the first day since we've left that I feel I've gotten out into the open," GS says.

  This wilderness will certainly be gone by the century's end. Already, as the valley widens, signs of slash-and-bum appear ("Fire very bad, sah!" Tukten says), and rockslides caused by destruction of the forests block the river with huge fallen trees. The water turns brown and torrential, diverted farther down the valley into channels between pale strands of deadwood and silted stones—this is the Uttar Ganga (Northern River) pouring away between the western mountains to its meeting with the Bheri and the great Karnoli, which will carry it southward into India.

  The trail, flooded by monsoon torrents, is lost among the river islands, oxbows, and incoming streams. Here and there the drifted trees serve us as bridges, and GS, slowly but steadily, walks almost all of them upright But I have lost that steady step and feel unbalanced by my rucksack, and must hitch ignominiously across the worst of them on my backside. Finally I cut myself a heavy stick of my own length, as probe and balance; it will be useful later as a stave.

  The woodlands open out onto the only broad flat valley in these mountains, used as summer pasture by the Magars from the south. In recent years, Dhorpatan has become a great encampment of Tibetans, who came here in the flight from the Chinese that began in 1950. They raise horses and potatoes, making journeys in winter to Pokhara and Kathmandu to trade their last turquoise, silver, and religious artifacts in the bazaars and visit with countrymen from other settlements, for Tibetans have a nomad heritage and love to travel.

  In Tibet, where wolves and brigands prosper, the nomads' camps and remote villages are guarded by big black or brindle mastiffs. Such dogs are also found in northern Nepal, and last year in the Bhote Khosi region GS was set upon by two of them that were guarding some Bhote packs left on the trail; he narrowly escaped serious injury. The mastiffs are so fierce that Tibetan travelers carry a charm portraying a savage dog fettered in chain: the chain is clasped by the mystical "thunderbolt," or dorje, and an inscription reads, "The mouth of the blue dog is bound beforehand."12 During the day the dogs are chained; at night they roam as sentinels and guards. In the first of the Dhorpatan encampments, we walked the center of the mud thoroughfares to avoid the snarling, straining animals on both sides. Then one of these broke or slipped its chain and came for us from behind, without a bark.

  Since GS was several yards ahead, I was selected for attack, which was thwarted only in the last split second. Luckily, I heard it coming, and swung around upon it with my heavy stick: the beast tumbled back and then came on again, snarling now in a low, ugly way. Searching in vain for a heavy rock, I did my best to crack its skull, while the dog lunged back and forth at the tip of my stick in horrid fury. Meanwhile, GS had located a heavy split of wood; he hurled it at the dog with all his force. The brute dodged, then sprang after it, sinking its teeth deep into the wood. Finally, it was driven off by a Tibetan, who until now had watched calmly from the doorway of his hut to see how I might fare. From Dhorpatan north across the Himalaya, it was said, such dogs were common, and I never walked without my stave again. If I had not cut it in the hour before (after eight days of getting by without one), I might have been hurt badly, and I marvel to this day at the precise timing.

  Dhorpatan has no bazaar and no real center, being strung out in scattered hut clusters all along the northern side of the broad valley. There are a few low-caste Magars here, but otherwise the people are Tibetan. Buddhist prayer flags fly from every hut, and heaps of prayer stones rise like gigantic cairns from the valley floor.

  When the porters appear, our supplies are stored in the cold back room of a dank earthen house set against the open hillside. We shall sleep here, too, to guard things, for as in most refugee settlements, morale is low and theft endemic. Across the passage is a common room where villagers come and go, and beyond that room, at the heart of the house, is a simple altar. Here the day ends with the low murmuring of om mani padme hum. As she chants, the old woman kneads dark ivory beads with one dried hand and with the other twirls an ancient prayer wheel of silver and copper. The prayer wheel is inscribed with the same mantra, and so is the tight-rolled scroll inside it, spinning out the invocation that calls the universe to attention:

  OM!

  OCTOBER 7

  Half of our porters left this morning, returning over Jaljala Ridge to the Kali Gandaki, and the Tibetans who might have replaced them are busy digging their potatoes for trade across the mountains. GS is understandably upset: why wasn't he warned of this potato harvest by the trekking outfitters in Kathmandu, who had assured him that porters were abundant in Dhorpatan? Jang-bu says there is not one porter to be found —"maybe tomorrow."

  The five young Tamangs brought from Kathmandu, Tukten the Sherpa, and old Bimbahadur the Magar are still with us. The Tamangs, or Lamas, are hill people of Mongol origins from the Trisuli River region, west of Kathmandu; like the Gurungs and Magars, the Tamangs are ancient inhabitants of Nepal, and followed some form of the old B'on religion. These days they incline toward Buddhism, and they get on well with the Sherpas, whom they much resemble in their cheerful, willing ways. Pirim and his brother Tulo Kansha, Karsung, Danbahadur, and Ram Tarang are lean, barefoot youths whose heavy work does not spoil the adventure of new places, and they will go as far as we will take them, although they have no boots or clothes for the deep snows. As for the old Magar, he had said goodbye, and was on the point of heading off with the rest, but Tukten charmed him out of it, this Tukten with his disconcerting smile.

  Tukten has elf's ears and a thin neck, a yellow face, and the wild wise eyes of a naljorpa, or Tibetan yogi. He radiates that inner quiet which is often associated with spiritual attainment, but perhaps his attainment is a dark one. The other Sherpas are uneasy with him; they mutter that he drinks too much, uses foul language, is not to be trusted. Apparently he has demeaned himself by taking this job as a porter. Yet they defer to him as if he possessed some sort of magic, and sometimes I think I feel his power, too.

  This disreputable fellow is somehow known to me, like a dim figure from another life. Tukten himself seems aware that we are in some sort of relation, which he accepts in a way that I cannot; that he is not here by accident is, for me, a restless instinct, whereas he takes our peculiar bond for granted. More often than I like, I feel that gaze of his, as if he were here to watch over me, as if it were he who had made me cut that stick: the gaze is open, calm, benign, without judgment of any kind, and yet, con
fronted with it, as with a mirror, I am aware of all that is hollow in myself, all that is greedy, angry, and unwise.

  I am grateful for a day of rest. My knees and feet and back are sore, and all my gear is wet. I wear my last dry socks upside down so that the hole in the heel sits on the top of my foot; these underpants, ripped, must be worn backward; my broken glasses' frame is taped; my hair is tangled. Dawa brings hot water for laundry and a wash—Dawa and I are the only members of this expedition who enjoy bathing—and I put on clean damp clothes, after which, at my behest, GS crops my long hair to the skull. For years I have worn a wristband of heavy braided cord, first because it was a gift, and latterly as an affectation; this is cut off, too. Finally, I remove my watch, as the time it tells is losing all significance.

  In the rain, all day, the Tibetans come to look at us, and again I am struck by the resemblances between our American Indians and these Mongol peoples. Most Dhorpatan Tibetans have the small stature, small hands and feet and noses of the Eskimo, the Mongoloid eye-fold, dark copper skin, and crow-black hair: even the low red-trimmed boots of hide and wool are very similar in appearance and design to the Eskimo mukluks. Their ornaments of turquoise and silver, on the other hand, suggest the Pueblo Indians and the Navajo, while the beads, braids, and striped blankets flung over bare shoulders evoke nothing so much as old pictures of the Plains tribes, an effect enhanced by the squalor of their encampments and the quarrelsome dogs. When traveling, these people use hide tents, children are carried papoose-fashion, and the basis of their diet is a barley or maize meal known as tsampa; no real kinship has been demonstrated between American Indian and Asiatic tongues, yet a similar farina of the Algonldan tribes of my own region is called "samp."

  Such similarities are doubtless superficial, but others are more than remarkable in cultures so widely separated in time and space. The animistic kinship with the world around that permeates the life of the Gurung and other tribes in the corners of these mountains (including some that have taken up modern religions), as well as that of the Chukchi Esldmos and other remnant hunter-gatherers of eastern Asia, differs little in its spirit among most of the Eskimos and Indians of the Americas. The great thunderbird of North America is known to the forest Tungus of Siberia; and the sun symbols and sacred eyes, the thread-crosses, cosmic trees, and swastikas that symbolize esoteric teachings of the Old World from ancient Egypt to present-day Tibet have been widespread in the New World since very early times—so early, in fact, that present estimates of dates for nomadic waves of Asian hunters across the Bering land bridge into the New World do not seem to account for them. (Such dates are regularly set back, and may be meaningless; on a clear day one can actually see one continent from the offshore islands of the other, and for all we know people were traveling in both directions on the sea and ice even when Beringia was under water.)

  Ignoring that body of peculiar lore based on vanished continents and cosmic Masters13—and putting aside the current speculation about ocean travel by such atypical Indians as the Inca, the many cultural similarities between the pre-Aryan Dravidians and the Maya, and accounts seeming to indicate that Buddhist missionaries reached the Aleutians and traveled as far south as California by the fourteenth century14—one remains faced with an uneasy choice between eerily precise archetypal symbols and the existence and perpetuation of a body of profound intuitive knowledge that antedates all known religions of man's history.

  Asian traditions refer to a hidden kingdom— Shambala, the Center—in an unknown part of Inner Asia. (The Gobi Desert, formerly fertile, now a repository of old bones, is often cited; the desiccation of Central Asia, as broad lakes vanished in dry pans and grasslands turned into shifting sands, might have turned an ancient city into a legend. The death of a civilization can come quickly: the change in climate that dried up rivers and destroyed the savannas of the central Sahara scattered the great pastoral civilizations of Fessan and Tassili in just a few centuries after 2500 B.C.) More likely, Shambala is a symbol for the Aryan cultures that emerged in that vast region between 6000 and 5000 B.C.—the apparent source of esoteric mystery-cults throughout Eurasia, which have echoes to this day in the Tantric Buddhism of Tibet. According to one Tibetan lama, these mysteries "are the faint echoes of teaching that existed from time immemorial in Central and North Asia."15 Another believes that "no people since the beginning ... has ever been without some fragment of this secret lore."16 This view is supported by ethnologists,17 who find the same pattern of shamanistic practice not only in Asia and the Americas but in Africa, Australia, Oceania, and Europe. The historical diffusion of such teachings— and perhaps the prehistorical as well—is supported by striking consistencies in the practice of what Westerners, having lost the secrets, refer to with mixed fascination and contempt as "mysticism" or "the occult" but which for the less alienated cultures, past and present, is only another aspect of reality.

  The American Indian traditions are Eastern cultures, thousands of miles and perhaps thousands of years from their source. Anyone familiar with Zen thought or the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism will not be astonished by the insights attributed in recent years to a Yaqui Indian sorcerer of northern Mexico.18 In content, attitude, and especially in that cryptic manner of expression which the inexpressible requires, there is nothing in the comments of this shaman that might not have been spoken by a Kagyu-pa lama or Zen roshi. Innumerable parallels to Eastern teachings among North American traditions might be cited, such as the Aztec concept of existence as a dream state, or the great awe of wind and sky that the Ojibwa of our northern prairies share with the vanished Aryans of the Asian steppes.19

  Tibetan oracle-priests and Siberian shamans practice dream-travel, telepathy, mystical heat, speed-running, death prediction, and metempsychosis, all of which are known to New World shamans: the Algonldan medicine man who travels as a bird to the spirit world, the jaguar-shamans of the Amazon would be impressed but not surprised by the powers attributed to yogis and naljorpas. The energy or essence or breath of being that is called prana by Hindu yogis and chi by the Chinese is known as orenda to the Cree.20 Such concepts as karma and circular time are taken for granted by almost all American Indian traditions; time as space and death as becoming are implicit in the earth view of the Hopi, who avoid all linear constructions, knowing as well as any Buddhist that Everything is Right Here Now. As in the great religions of the East, the American Indian makes small distinction between religious activity and the acts of every day: the religious ceremony is life itself.

  Like the Atman of the Vedas, like the Buddhist Mind, like Tao, the Great Spirit of the American Indian is everywhere and in all things, unchanging. Even the Australian aborigines—considered to be the most ancient race on earth—distinguish between linear time and a "Great Time" of dreams, myths, and heroes, in which all is present in this moment. It stirs me that this primordial intuition has been perpetuated by voice and act across countless horizons and for centuries on end, illuminating the dream-life of primitives, the early Indo-European civilizations of the Sumerians and Hittites, the ancient Greeks and the Egyptians, guarded by hidden cults in the Dark Ages, emerging in Christian, Hasidic, and Muslim mysticism (Sufism) as well as in all the splendorous religions of the East. And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.

  OCTOBER 8

  An emissary to the Tibetans from the Dalai Lama's exiled court at Dharmsala, in India, has lately come by way of Tarakot, which lies across the mountains to the north. He says the trail is "very hard, very steep and slippery, too many ups and downs." Since this describes most Himalayan trails, especially in time of snow, it is not to be taken seriously. But another Tibetan, come south in recent days, says that at Jang Pass between here and Tarakot the snow is higher than the knees, and this bad news will make it hard to conscript porters. Also, th
e police at the Tarakot checkpost are said to be very arbitrary, paying little attention to documents issued by colleagues far away in Kathmandu; they may refuse to let us enter Dolpo, even though our trekking permits authorize us to go as far north as Phoksimido Lake. Last year an anthropologist had a permit to go to Tarap, in Dolpo, but was forbidden to continue beyond Tarakot, where he was stranded for the winter by a late October blizzard that shut off the Jang Pass. And that blizzard is bad news, too, since the pass between Tarakot and Shey is much higher than this first one at the Jang, and we must cross and then recross it before winter.

  Dhorpatan is a sort of purgatory. The dungeon atmosphere of these cold quarters, the merciless rain that drips to the mud floor through the slat roof, the heinous din of the dogfights under the window—at least four last night-deepen the depression caused by all these tales of obstacles and hazards, of icy streams and heavy snows between here and our destination.

  Last night, the eerie, clear song of a Tibetan boy disturbed me, not because it was so strange but because it seemed familiar; I realized at last that what it recalled were the sad Quechua huainus of the Andes. Later I dreamed about my beautiful eight-year-old boy, whose mother died of cancer just last year. In the dream, I paid a visit to a dark cage-like shelter, where he was being kept with other children. He came to me, smiling, and together we petted a little fox that was also in the cage. Now the cage was seen as an animal pen with a tattered collection of poor creatures in the corners, and I noticed that the little fox was uncared for, and covered with grime. Looking bewildered, it took such shelter as it could find beneath a big and bossy hen that was preoccupied with its own chicks. Realizing that the little fox was Alex, I woke up stricken.