The Snow leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

  In recent dreams, I have twice seen light so brilliant, so intense, that it "woke me up," but the light did not continue into wakefulness. Which was more real, the waking or the dream? The last Japanese character written in this life by Soen Roshi's venerable teacher, and the last word spoken, was the word for "dream."

  OCTOBER 31

  Today is the last day of October.

  I am tired, and the early climb takes a half hour longer than the climb at the same hour yesterday. At the rim we rest briefly before starting the descent into the blue shadows of the bowl. I plant my stave, then lack a foothold into the snow wall, then move the stick down, kick another step—"Never move more than one thing at a time!" GS calls—until, reaching a point just above a chute of sharp jutting shale, I level a platform for both feet and prepare to receive the loads. Out of the sun, the air is very cold. GS lowers my backpack, then a sack of lentils, then our supply of flour in a big neoprene bag. I work the lentils and the flour over to my right, to a point where they will clear the stretch of shale, then let them fall. The lentils in their squashy sack soon come to rest where the wall becomes steep slope, a hundred yards below, but the slick neoprene bag sails so far down into the bowl, and at such speed, that the sherpas, whose heads have now appeared over the rim, give it a cheer.

  With my backpack, punching with my stick, I descend carefully to the lentils, then keep on going, sliding the rough sack alongside. Even here, the bowl side is so steep that facing the slope on all fours, I am almost upright, and I must kick steps into the hard crust as I go down, to avoid a long and lacerating fall.

  The figures above, bringing more loads to the rim, look very small; I see Phu-Tsering make his way down to the platform. Then, from the sky, as the imminent sun shoots cold rays over the ice rim of the Kang, comes a cry of warning.

  A load is falling.

  Black figures on the sky, a doomsday sun, the blaring ice, and this dark bounding thing, quite small at first, looming larger with each carom as it comes: a load is falling. Clumsy with my pack, I clutch the crust, afraid that any move may be the wrong one, since the trajeotories of the dark thing are so erratic; I kick desperately at the ice, making a purchase for a leap aside at the last second. Someone yells as the lunging shape strikes the slope above me and takes off again, filling the sky: that it will strike precisely where I lie seems astonishing even in this last hallucinatory second. I leap leftward, and GS's big case—books, spare boots, camera equipment—splits the glazed snow where I had been and whistles downward. I have lost my hold on the slope, and start to fall, but my stave, punched through the crust, comes to my rescue, and I lie spread-eagled, forehead to the snow, gasping for breath. Far above, GS's voice is high, berating Phu-Tsering for his carelessness. Later, when I tease Phu-Tsering ("I thought you were my friend!"), he laughs wildly out of nervousness, saying, "I sorry!"

  We hoped to have the loads down to the snow lake by midday, but the warmth and windlessness now work against us. In the steep stretch, the loads slide well upon the crust, even with one man for three loads, but later, when the sun is overhead, they bog down and must be dragged through softening snow. Frequently we sink up to the crotch, and it is midafternoon before the first loads reach the snow lake; the rest lie scattered on the slopes above. GS, on snow-shoes, has fared better than the rest of us, but we are all soaked and exhausted.

  The sunset behind the steep walls of the bowl will bring instant cold. The sherpas, unladen, set off rapidly for Shey, although they cannot reach there before dark. Much as I wish to go to Shey this evening, it is folly to set out wet and tired down a tortuous three-hour course of drifts and ice-stream boulders and floes; I say I shall camp here. GS agrees. Although we did not eat at noon, we are too tired to be hungry. And so we bivouac by the strange pond—a depression of black clay where, at this season, snow and ice melt midday—and share the last tin of sardines, and arc huddled in our sleeping bags when darkness comes the late afternoon.

  A sundown wind has died away to utter stillness, and a good thing, too, since the snowbanks all around are deep and dry, all set to drift. GS is a remorseless sleeper, but for me the night will be a long one. I think about the great black eagle that crossed the sky at twilight: this can only be the golden eagle, which I last saw in western mountain lands of North America. Perhaps this eagle is the one that passed over Snow-fields Camp at just this time of day. What can it be hunting, this heroic bird, in bitter white waste, at the edge of darkness?

  AT CRYSTAL MOUNTAIN

  As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full, and he who can draw it away from before his eyes, as one draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds.

  RABBI NACHMANN OF BRATZLAV

  Days and months are the travelers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. ... I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind — filled with a strong desire to wander. ... I walked through mists and clouds, breathing the thin air of high altitudes and stepping on slippery ice and snow, till at last through a gateway of clouds, as it seemed, to the very paths of the sun and moon, I reached the summit, completely out of breath and nearly frozen to death. Presently the sun went down and the moon rose glistening in the sky.

  BASHO

  The Narrow Road to the Deep North

  NOVEMBER 1

  This Black Pond Camp, though well below the Kang Pass, lies at an altitude of 17,000 feet, and an hour after the sun sinks behind the peaks, my wet boots have turned to blocks of ice. GS's thermometer registers —20° Centigrade (4° below zero Fahrenheit) and though I wear everything I have, I quake with cold all night. Dawn comes at last, but making hot water from a pot of ice is difficult at this altitude, and it is past nine before boots are thawed and we are under way.

  The snow bowl is the head of an ice river that descends a deep canyon to Shey. In the canyon we meet Jang-bu and Phu-Tsering, on their way up to fetch some food and pots: Dawa, they say, is down again with acute snow blindness.

  Sherpa tracks in the frozen shadows follow the glassy boulders of the stream edge, and somewhere along the way, I slip, losing the hoopoe feather that adorned my cap. The river falls steeply, for Shey lies three thousand feet below Kang La, and in the deep snow, the going is so treacherous that the sherpas have made no path; each man flounders through the drifts as best he can. Eventually, from a high corner of the canyon, rough red-brown lumps of human habitation come in view. The monastery stands like a small fort on a bluff where another river flows in from the east; a mile below, the rivers vanish into a deep and dark ravine. Excepting the lower slopes of the mountainside behind the monastery, which is open to the south, most of this treeless waste lies under snow, broken here and there by calligraphic patterns of bare rock, in an atmosphere so wild and desolate as to overwhelm the small huddle of dwellings.

  High to the west, a white pyramid sails on the sky—the Crystal Mountain. In summer, this monument of rock is a shrine for pilgrims from all over Dolpo and beyond, who come here to make a prescribed circle around the Crystal Mountain and attend a holy festival at Shey.1 What is stirring about this peak, in snow time, is its powerful shape, which even today, with no clouds passing, makes it appear to be forging through the blue. "The power of such a mountain is so great and yet so subtle that, without compulsion, people are drawn to it from near and far, as if by the force of some invisible magnet; and they will undergo untold hardships and privations in their inexplicable urge to approach and to worship the centre of this sacred power. . . . This worshipful or religious attitude is not impressed by scientific facts, like figures of altitude, which are foremost in the mind of modern man. Nor is it motivated by the urge to 'conquer' the mountain. . . ."2

  A gravel island under Shey is reached by crossing ice and stones of a shallow channel. At the island's lower end are prayer walls and a stone stockade for animals; farther on, small conduits div
ert a flow of river water to a group of prayer mills in the form of waterwheels, each one housed separately in its own stone shrine. The conduits are frozen and the wheels are still. On top of the small stupas are offerings of white quartz crystals, presumably taken from the Crystal Mountain in the summer, when the five wheels spin five ancient prayer drums, sending OM MANI PADME HUM down the cold canyon.

  On the far side of a plank bridge, a path climbs the bank to two big red-and-white entrance stupas on the bluff: I go up slowly. Prayer flags snap thinly on the wind, and a wind-bell has a wooden wing in the shape of a half-moon that moves the clapper; over the glacial rumble on the river stones, the wistful ring on the light wind is the first sound that is heard here at Shey Gompa.

  The cluster of a half-dozen stone houses is stained red, in sign that Shey is a monastery, not a village. Another group of five small houses sits higher up the mountain; above this hamlet, a band of blue sheep may be seen with the naked eye. Across the river to the north, stuck on a cliff face at the portals of the canyon, is a red hermitage. Otherwise, except for prayer walls and the stone corrals, there are only the mighty rock formations and dry treeless mountainside where snow has melted, and the snow and sky.

  I move on slowly, dull in mind and body. Gazing back up the Black River toward the rampart of icy cornices, I understand that we have come over the Kanjirobas to the mountain deserts of the Tibetan Plateau: we have crossed the Himalaya from south to north. But not until I had to climb this short steep path from the wintry river to the bluffs did I realize how tired I was after thirty-five days of hard trekking. And here I am, on this first day of November, standing before the Crystal Monastery, with its strange stones and flags and bells under the snows.

  The monastery temple with its attached houses forms a sort of open court facing the south. Two women and two infants, sitting in the sun, make no sign of welcome. Fearing Khampa brigands, the women had locked themselves into their houses a few days ago, when Jang-bu and GS first appeared, and plainly they are still suspicious of our seemingly inexplicable mission. The younger woman is weaving a rough cloth on an ancient loom. When I say, "Namas-te!" she repeats it, as if trying the word out. Three scraggy dzos and an old black nanny goat excepted, these are the only sentient beings left at Shey, which its inhabitants call Somdo, or "Confluence," because of the meeting of rivers beneath its bluff—the Kangju, "Snow Waters" (the one I think of as Black River, because of the black pond at its head, and the black eagle, and the black patterns of its stones and ice in the dark canyon), and the Yeju, "Low Waters" (which I shall call White River, because it comes down from the eastern snows).

  For cooking hut and storeroom, Jang-bu has appropriated the only unlocked dwelling. Like all the rest, it has a flat roof of clay and saplings piled on top with brushwood, a small wooden door into the single room, and a tiny window in the western wall to catch afternoon light. The solitary ray of light, as in a medieval painting, illumines the smoke-blackened posts that support the roof, which is so low that GS and I must bend half-over. The earth floor is bare, except for a clay oven built up in three points to hold a pot, with a hole near the floor to blow life into the smoky fire of dung and brushwood. Jang-bu and Phu-Tsering's tent is just outside the door, while Dawa will sleep inside with the supplies. GS pitches his blue tent just uphill from the hut, while I place mine some distance away, facing east up the White River toward the sunrise.

  The cooking hut is the sometime dwelling of the brother of the younger woman, Tasi Chanjun, whom the sherpas call Namu, meaning hostess. (Among Tibetans as among native Americans, it is often rude to address people by their formal name.) Her little boy, aged about four, is Karma Chambel, and her daughter, perhaps two, is Nyima Poti. Nyima means "sun" or ''sunny"—Sunny Poti! The old woman's name is Sonam: her husband, Chang Rapke, and her daughter Karima Poti have gone away to winter in Saldang, and Sonam lives alone in the abandoned hamlet up the mountain. Namu says that before the snows there were forty people here, including twenty-odd monks and two lamas: all are gone across the mountains to Saldang, from where—is this a warning to outlandish men who come here without women?—her husband will return in a few days. Namu's husband has the key to the Crystal Monastery, or so she says, and will doubtless bring it with him when he comes to visit, in four or five days, or in twenty. Namu is perhaps thirty years old, and pretty in a sturdy way, and self-dependent. She speaks familiarly of B'od but not Nepal; even Ring-mo is a foreign land, far away across Kang La.

  That the Lama is gone is very disappointing. Nevertheless, we are extremely happy to be here, all the more so since it often seemed that we would never arrive at all. Now we can wake up in the morning without having to put on wet boots, break camp, get people moving; and there is home to return to in the evening. There are no porters harassing our days, and we are sheltered, more or less, from evil weather. The high pass between Shey and the outside world lies in the snow peaks, ghostly now in the light of the cold stars. "God, I'm glad I'm not up there tonight," GS exclaims, as we emerge from the smoky hut, our bellies warm with lentil soup. We know how fortunate it was that the Kang Pass was crossed in this fine, windless weather, and wonder how long fair skies will hold, and if Tukten and Gyaltsen will appear. It is November now, and everything depends upon the snows.

  NOVEMBER 2

  At almost 15,000 feet, Shey is as high as the Jang Pass. It is located in what has been described as Inner Dolpo, which is walled off from eastern Dolpo by a surrounding crescent of high peaks, and must be one of the highest inhabited areas on earth. Its people are of pure Tibetan stock, with a way of life that cannot differ much from that of the Ch'ang Tartars out of Central Asia who are thought to have been the original Tibetans, and their speech echoes the tongue of nomads who may have arrived two thousand years ago. Dolpo was formerly a part of western Tibet, and it is certain that some form of Buddhism came here early. Beyond the Karnali River, to the north and west, the Tibetan Plateau rises to Kailas, the holy "Mount Sumeru" or "Meru" of Hindus and Buddhists, home of Shiva and the Center of the world; from Mount Kailas, four great rivers—the Karnali, the Indus, the Sutlej, and the Brahmaputra—flow down in a great mandala to the Indian seas.

  Shey Gompa (in Tibetan, Shel dgon-pa) is a monastery of the Kagyu sect, which was established in the eleventh century as a departure from the Kalachakra Tantrism of the Old Sect, or Nyingma. Kalachakra (Circle of Time) came to Tibet in the same century; it traditionally derives from a Tantra or treatise known as Journey to Shambala, which teaches the adept how to transcend time (death), and is supposed to be the Book of Wisdom that appears in portraits of the Bodhisattva called Manjusri.4 In Kalachakra, the already numerous Buddha aspects are split once more into peaceful and wrathful forms of the same deity; thus, Avalokita, the Great Compassionate One, is also perceived as Mahakala, or Great Time, the Lord of Death—the Tantric personification of the disintegrating forces of the Cosmos, often depicted wearing skulls and human skins, brandishing darts, and stamping upon copulating humankind. Mahakala will liberate lose who can die to their past in order to be reborn, and terrify those who cling to the worldly existence of samsara, the thirsting and quenching and thirsting anew that is symbolized by the priest's skull cup full of blood. For better or worse, the Kalachakra pantheon of peaceful-and-wrathful deities was retained by the "reformed" sects—the Kagyu-pas, the Sakya-pas, and, much later, the Gelug-pas, led by the Dalai Lamas, who have dominated Tibetan Buddhism since the sixteenth century.

  The Kagyu sect was established by the great Lama Marpa, the "Translator," who made three trips to India to study with a famous teacher called Naropa. When Marpa returned to Tibet, he transmitted the Dharma to Milarepa. Subsequently, Milarepa's disciples split off from Kagyu as the Karma-pas, and this new school, in the thirteenth century, was the first Tibetan sect5 to establish influence with the emperor of China, Kublai Khan. (Subsequently, according to the chronicles of Marco Polo, the Khan's conversion was strengthened by a lama who triumphed over competing divines of Christ
ian, Muslim, and Taoist persuasions by causing a cup to rise to the royal lips of its own accord.)

  Gelug-pa reforms since the sixteenth century have not changed the nature of Karma-Kagyu, or not, at least, in such far places as the Crystal Mountain. In its ascetic disciplines and spare teachings, which discourage metaphysical speculation in favor of prolonged and solitary meditation. Karma-pa practice is almost identical to that of Zen, which also emphasizes intuitive experience over priestly ritual and doctrine. Both have been called the "Short Path" to liberation, and although this direct path is difficult and steep, it is also the pure essence of Buddhism, with all religious trappings cut away. It seems to me wonderful karma that the Crystal Monastery belongs to this "Zen" sect, and that the Lama of Shey is a notable tulku or incarnate lama, revered throughout the Land of Dolpo as the present reincarnation of the Lama Marpa. On my way here, I entertained visions of myself in monkish garb attending the Lama in his ancient mysteries, and getting to light the butter lamps into the bargain; I suppose I had hoped he would be my teacher. That the gompa is locked and the Lama gone away might be read as a karmic reprimand to spiritual ambition, a silent teaching to this ego that still insists upon itself, like the poor bleat of a goat on the north wind.

  Last night, the temperature sank to —13° Centigrade and a strong east wind rattled my tent: this morning I move the tent into the stockyard of an empty house. On the corral walls lie some excellent stone carvings, one of them portraying Tara (in Tibetan, Dölma), born of the compassionate tear of Avalokita (Chen-resigs) and the embodiment of the Bodhisattva spirit. As the feminine aspect of Chen-resigs, Dölma is the great "Protectress" of Tibet, and so I am pleased to find her on my wall.

  The temple is distinguished from the buildings that abut it on both sides by the ceremonial raised entrance under a roofed porch and the abundant ornaments upon the roof, which include prayer flags, tritons, the great horns of an argali, and the gigantic antlers of a Sikkim stag, a creature of northern Bhutan and southeastern Tibet. (Since neither animal is supposed to occur here, GS is fascinated by the origins of these horns and antlers, especially since the Sikkim stag is said to be extinct.6)