The Snow leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

  I wait, facing the north; instinct tells me to stand absolutely still. Cloud mist, snow, and utter silence, utter solitude: extinction. Then, in the great hush, the clouds draw apart, revealing the vast Dhaulagiri snow-fields. I breathe, mists swirl, and all has vanished— nothing! I make a small, involuntary bow.

  A downward path is forged through the wet snows, striking a tree line of dwarfed cedar six hundred feet below, and emerging at dusk on a saddleback ridge of alphine tundra where it is flat enough to pitch a tent Here Tukten and GS catch up with us. Just at darkness, the clouds lift: at 12,500 feet, the campsite is surrounded by bright glaciers. The five peaks of Dhaulagiri shine in the black firmament, and over all this whiteness rings a silver moon, the full moon of October, when the lotus blooms.

  OCTOBER 11

  In the clear night, bright stars descend all the way to the horizon, and before dawn, a band of black appears beyond the peaks, as if one could see past earth's horizon into outer space. The circle of silver peaks turns pink, then a fresh white as the sun ignites Churen Himal, 24,158 feet high, and Putha Hiunchuli, just four hundred feet below. The air is ringing. GS declares that in eastern Nepal, under Mount Everest, he saw nothing to match the prospect from this aerie, all but encircled by great pinnacles of ice.

  The mountain sky is bare—wind, wind, and cold. Because of the cold, the Tamangs squashed into the Sherpas' tent, but in the night gusts, the tent collapsed, and at daybreak all are singing from beneath it Now, half-naked in the brittle air, the Tamangs hunch barefoot at the fire, kneading tsampa and humming softly in the smoke; they remind me of young Machiguenga Indians at the Andean river campfires of long ago. Jang-bu and Gyaltsen, with new porters, must have stopped somewhere on the south side of the pass; because of the cold, we break camp quickly and continue down the north side without waiting.

  From deep in the earth, the roar of the river rises. The rhododendron leaves along the precipice are burnished silver, but night still fills the steep ravines where southbound migrants descend at day to feed and rest. The golden birds fall from the morning sun like blowing sparks that drop away and are extinguished in the dark.

  With the first sun rays we come down into still forest of gnarled birch and dark stiff firs. Through light filtered by the straying lichens, a silver bird flies to a cedar, fanning crimsoned wings on the sunny bark. Then it is gone, leaving behind a vague longing, a sad emptiness.

  The path continues down into the oaks. A thousand feet below is a mountain meadow, and here by a herdsman's shed of stone, we wait for Jang-bu. I sit back in straw and dung warmth against the sunny stones. A brilliant black-red beetle comes, and a husky grasshopper, nibbing its fiery legs. A crow flops to a cedar by the river, and the crow's wings, too, are filled with the hard silver light of the Himalaya. "Wherever you go, the crow shows up, sooner or later," GS remarks, "and of all the crows, I like the raven best. In Alaska, at forty below, no sign of life—and there's the raven!" (GS had a pet raven while attending the University of Alaska, and this bird brought about his first encounter with the girl who became his wife: her attention was drawn to a man shouting at the sky, commanding an unseen raven to come back.)

  With its crows and river willows and snow mountains all around, this bowl might be in western North America. D would have loved these mountains. As a girl, my wife had spent much of her time in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and later in the Alps in southern France; she always wished to see the Himalaya.

  When I was a child I rode my horse to the top of the mountain where the sun shone down on me, and the valley green in meadow grass lay far below. I looked to the sky and waited, filled with longing. Nothing sounded. In sorrow I lay down on the earth, my arms outstretched to hug it. O Earth, warm and just right, everything just right, the shape of bark, and smell of grass, and sound of leaves brushing the wind, I wanted to be just right too.

  But no voice tells me I am and I rise from the mute ground and get on the horse and ride back down the mountain.1

  Lovely in person and in spirit, a gifted writer and wonderful teacher with a passionate, inquiring mind, exceptionally intelligent and kind—such was the view of all who knew her well. One friend remarked, "She has no mud on her soul." Yet at times, there was an above-life quality as if she were practicing for the day when the higher state that she aspired to must come. To live with a saint is not difficult, for a saint makes no comparisons, but saint-like aspiration presents problems. I found her goodness maddening, and behaved badly. My days with D were tainted with remorse; I could not abide myself when near her, and therefore took advantage of my work to absent myself on expeditions all around the world—once I went away for seven months. Yet love was there, half-understood, never quite finished; the end of respect that puts relationships to death did not occur.

  The sword light on the peaks brings back the snows of Courchevel, in the French Alps, where we went skiing just a year before D died. It was a happy trip, and gave us new hope for the future. From Courchevel we drove to Geneva, from where she would fly to America next day. I was on my way to Italy, to sell a small farmhouse in the mountains of Umbria where she refused to go.

  In the dark winter afternoon, in the old quarter of Geneva, we discovered a most beautiful bowl in a shop window, seven elegant thin black fishes in calligraphic design on old white and pale blue; the bowl, fired at Istafahan in the thirteenth century, seemed to float in the hands like an old leaf. But it was too expensive, and I found her something else. Next morning, her plane left an hour before mine, and in this interim, carried away by the drama of our parting, I telephoned the antique shop and arranged to buy the Istafahan bowl, which was eventually sent on to Italy to be carried home. The delicate thing was a symbol of a new beginning, and I meant to surprise D with it on her birthday, but when that day came we quarreled, and the bowl, put away for a better occasion, was forgotten altogether as the marriage came apart. No parting was quite final, each wild reconciliation was followed by new crisis; an exhausted decision to divorce was made on a late summer morning just five months before her death. That decision was firm, we made it calmly and were both relieved. The very next day, acting on an imperious inner command, I made a commitment to D, this time for good. She understood; sipping coffee in the sun, she merely nodded.

  It seems to me now that this mystifying command was related to an earlier intuition. For several years the certainly had deepened that my life was rushing toward a drastic change, and the strength of the premonition made me wonder if I was going to die. I had spoken to a few friends of this foreshadowing, and was working intensely on a book on Africa, knowing that very soon the work must stop; I wanted to finish while all research and impressions were fresh in my head. The book went to the typist on the day before D's first entry into the hospital, in late November, and I did not write again for nearly a year.

  In the autumn, D had begun to suffer from obscure pains that the doctors could not identify; she grew thin, wide-eyed, very beautiful She came home from the hospital in early December, when no clues to her pain were found, but two weeks later metastatic cancer was discovered, and she entered another hospital just before Christmas. She was frightened and depressed, and wished desperately to know that the love I felt for her was not just pity, that it had been there in some measure all along. I remembered the Istafahan bowl.

  On Christmas Eve, I had gone home to patch together some sort of Christmas for the children, but I forgot to bring the bowl back to New York. Had I given it to her earlier, she would have understood just what it meant; but by January, D was in such pain and so heavily sedated that any sort of present seemed forlorn. She scarcely knew friends who came to visit: what could she make of a bowl she had seen just once, on another continent, a year before? I had missed a precious chance, and I remember that as I propped her up in bed, coaxing her to concentrate, then opened up the box and placed the bowl in her hands, my heart was pounding. I could scarcely bear to watch how D stared at the bowl, grimacing in the effort to fight off the
pain, the drugs, the consuming cancer in her brain. But when I prepared to take it back, she pressed it to her heart, lay back like a child, eyes shining, and in a whisper got one word out: "Swit-zerland."

  Far overhead, the great lammergeier turns and turns.

  The porters are cooking their midmorning meal; they will eat the second of two daily meals at the end of the day's trek, in late afternoon. There is still no sign of Jang-bu, and no voice from the mountain; perhaps he is still in Dhorpatan, hunting for porters, or perhaps he has had trouble with them on the way. Phu-Tsering sends Dawa back in search, and the tireless Tukten volunteers to keep Dawa company; they go back up the steep mountain. In less than an hour, the Sherpas return, having seen the others on the upper trails. When Jang-bu and Gyaltsen come, at noon, the new porters set about their morning meal, and so we are delayed an hour longer.

  We wait by the stone hut. GS, beside himself, expends his energy by hiking off upriver; returning, he scans the mountains with his spotting scope. Blue sheep could occur here on the bare upper slopes, but they have been hunted heavily in this region by Pahari Hindus working out of Dhorpatan, and none are seen. On a high wooded ridge, however, he locates two Himalayan tahr, an archaic animal that is a transitional form between goat-antelopes and goats. Under the sky, the dark creatures are still, yet they give life to the whole mountain, and the Tamangs, looking through a telescope for the first time in their lives, dance and whistle in excitement

  The new porters are dirt-colored men in dirty rags and small black caps, carrying the curved Gorkha hatchet-knife called the kukri. They are not interested in the telescope. Most are "Kami" people of the blacksmith caste, soot-faced familiars of the smelting fire and the iron stolen from the rock, feared and despised as black magicians by primitive people throughout Eurasia and Africa since the beginning of this Dark Age of Iron. With them are two young Tibetans, who carry the heaviest loads, not only because they are smallest and weakest but because, being Buddhist, they are treated as inferior even by low-caste Hindus such as these.

  The "Dirty Kamis" are a sharp-eyed lot, so we are watchful, too. And we have hardly set out down the valley when the first malingerers fall by the wayside, pleading sore feet and dysentery; they fade with their loads into the bushes. We rout them out again, and stay behind them, to keep them from making off with our few supplies. During their frequent rests, sly Tukten infiltrates their ranks, smoking and grumbling with them, winking at us, and confusing them altogether.

  The trail follows the south bank of the Ghustang, a wild torrent off the Dhaulagiri glaciers that cascades down over rust-colored boulders through a forest of great evergreens, merging farther to the West with the Uttar Ganga and the lower Bheri Where bamboo appears, four thousand feet below our Dhaulagiri camp, a log bridge crosses the torrent and a trail climbs an open, grassy slope of stolid oaks and lithe wild doves that dance in the silver breeze of afternoon.

  At the valley ridge, the trail moves westward, down a hogback spine. There are droppings of fox and the yellow-throated marten, but excepting three startled pheasants, birds are few. Clouds come, and a light steady rain that ends at dusk, when wild rays of late sun bombard the mountains; far behind us and above, near snow line, a sun ray isolates the site of our Dhaulagiri camp.

  The trail descends again, down through hill pasture to the hamlet of Yamarkhar, a cluster of stone huts on the steep hillside. We arrive in darkness. Jang-bu is hunting out a place to sleep; since the porters have no tents, they must find shelter. All day we have gone steeply down and steeply up and down again, from 12,400 feet at our Dhaulagiri camp to 8000 feet at Yamarkhar. I have sore feet, a sore knee, and a sore back, and I think about the lammergeier seen this morning; in fifteen minutes, in a single glide, the great vulture could go where we have gone in ten hard hours.

  In the canyon, night has come. Though the moon is hidden by the peaks, its light points up the depth of the ravines. On the dark wall opposite us, the wink of a lone fire seems infernal, like a chink of light from fires in the mountain.

  OCTOBER 12

  The Dirty Kamis, in the great tradition of porters all around the world, will go no farther; no doubt they are daunted—I am, too—by the sight of the precipitous trail up the mountain face across the river. With a last, despairing look at the unlooted loads, they set off for Dhorpatan, taking the two Tibetan boys along. Though glad to be rid of them, we now discover that there are no porters to be had at Yamarkhar, and Jang-bu is bargaining with the hut's owner for the hire of five ponies. What the ponies will do in the snows of the Jang Pass is a problem we shall have to deal with when we get there.

  Because of high mountains to the east, this village will be dark until midmorning, but the upper slope of the mountain opposite is already in the sun when GS and I make the long slippery descent through the farm terraces into bamboo at the Pema torrent, which roars through the cold gloom of the ravine. A remarkable wood bridge has boarded sides that are carved in flowers, while the four posts at the bridge ends are sculpted crudely as paired dhauliyas, or "guardians," representing local deities of the old religions; such male and female portal figures are also made by coastal Indians of the Pacific Northwest. The females are holding their vulvae wide, as if in welcome to the realms of the mountain gods; sternly we cross the bridge and climb anew.

  The path meets the sun at a small hamlet, source of the fire seen last night in the moon shadow, and one of the very primitive communities still to be found in these deep inner canyons of the Himalaya. As the falcon flies, this place is not a mile from Yamarkhar, yet they might be in different lands, in different centuries. The stone houses of Yamarkhar are well separated, as in Tibet, while the dwellings here are all in one stepped pueblo on the hillside, so that the roof of one house is another's terrace, the levels connected by crude ladders hewn in a single log. Yamarkhar people dress like Nepali peasants; here the men wear loincloths and a blanket across the shoulders, and the women wind their hair in gigantic buns, which they comb in the sunlight with stiff broomlike brushes. Several women and one man wear striking necklaces of the white tusks of musk deer, one of the many primitive animals that are found in this evolutionary backwater, cut off from the rest of Eurasia by high mountains; the long recurved canine tusks are replaced in modern deer by antlers. This little deer is killed mostly for its musk, used as a perfume base; because one musk pod (a large gland in the male's belly skin) brings up to five hundred dollars in Kathmandu, the musk deer is disappearing from Nepal.

  Observing the inhabitants of this strange place is like watching people from a place of hiding, for they make a point of pretending we are not there. One man, leaning his head far back, smokes a primitive tubular pipe, while a woman grinds maize in a stone mortar, and three girls sit cracking small dark walnuts from the only trees left standing on the mountain. On a covered porch, two children dance; another beats a tom-tom. A very old man, bent double, creeps past a tobacco patch at the base of the buildings, in the hands behind his back an empty bowl.

  GS lingers and I keep on climbing, then pause to drink and wash in a mountain brook. Green finches come, and a hawk flies down the valley. Asters and everlasting, lavender and white; the soft humming of a bumblebee consoles me. Sitting awhile on a warm rock, I enjoy the view of Yamarfiiar as it comes into the sun. At this season, the flat roofs are bright with the fire colors of tie harvest, which will sustain the inhabitants through the long winter—yellow squash, red peppers, bronze tobacco, a red millet, maize, and hemp, which is used for twine and cooking oil as well as marijuana.

  The path climbs onward to a dark new-broken field under the sky. A ragged man bawls at two humped black cattle as a crude plowshare bucks and lunges at the stony soil; such wood-tipped plows were used three thousand years before the time of Christ. Higher still, in scattered oak forest, a herder leads his string of shaggy ponies, forty or more, down from summer pasture near the summits, and once again that feeling comes that in starting north across the Himalaya, we move unnaturally against
the seasons. A boy runs back and forth over the acorns, shying quick stones to keep the beasts in line, and a little girl with a long stick brings up the rear. Startled by my presence in the wood, she darts aside; once safely past, she calls out a shy question, "Who are you?" Or that is what her soft voice seems to say. I cannot understand, and cannot answer. We smile, and she brings her hands up into prayer position— "Namas-te!" I do the same: "Namas-te!" "I salute you!" And she skips away downhill after her ponies.

  I wait in an oak grove for the others. Far below, in a burst of white, snow pigeons plummet from the sun into the darkness of the gorge. In the snap of white wings in the morning light I hear the pigeons that I kept in the barn of New England childhood. I have always been drawn to the wild doves and pigeons, and especially the morning dove of home.

  Three thousand feet above the Pema, the trail turns north, traversing upper valleys. GS has come and, like foraging bears, we strip the bushes of tart barberries and rose hips as we move along. Now the trail penetrates a dank rock gorge without sun, higher and higher, passing big caves and a lonely cairn of stones. We bivouac where the head of this canyon opens out under the sky, in hopes that Jang-bu will turn up at evening with the ponies.

  OCTOBER 13

  The monsoon rains, supposed to end by the first week in October, still beset us; we are mired down. By the time Jang-bu and the pack ponies appeared, toward eight last evening, a cold rain was falling, and at noon today it is still raining hard. This morning the ponies broke loose in the storm, and their owner is out hunting them over the mountains; perhaps they have run back to Yamarkhar. My bedding is soaked by the mud puddle in the foot of my tent, which is pitched on a slant for want of flat terrain. With luck there will be sun to dry the gear before we climb up higher: I am cold already. All this rain must be snow at Jang La, three days away, but we are committed to this route; it is too late to retreat, to attempt to go around by the Jamoson-Tscharka route, or to fly to Jirnila, even if new permits could be obtained. GS calls out through the rain, "We have to get across that pass, even if it takes a week—otherwise, we're finished."