The Snow leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

  Down in the shelter of a gully, a yak caravan is preparing to set out; two men strap last loads on the balky animals. Before long, there appears another caravan, this one bound north; having discharged its salt and wool, it is headed home with a cargo of grain, lumber, and variegated goods, its yaks rewarded for their toil with big red tassels on their packs and small orange ones decking out their ears. The dark shapes of the nomads glint with beads and earrings, amulets, and silver daggers; here at the Ch'ang Tartars of two thousand years ago. With their harsh cries and piercing whistles, naked beneath filthy skins of animals, these wild men bawling at rough beasts are fit inhabitants of such dark gorges; one can scarcely imagine them anywhere else. The Redfaced Devils are inquisitive, and look me over before speaking out in the converse of the pilgrim.

  Where do you come from?

  Shey Gompa.

  Ah. Where are you going?

  To the Bheri.

  Ah.

  And as the wary dog skirt past, we nod, grimace, and resume our paths to separate destinies and graves.

  Winding around beneath towers of rock that fall away into abyss after abyss, the path wanders randomly in all directions. In the cold shine of its ice, this waste between high passes is a realm of blind obliterating nature. The labyrinth is beautiful, yet my heart is touched by dread. I hurry on. At last the ledge trail straightens, headed south, and I reach the foot of the last climb to the pass just before noon. On a knoll, there is a prayer wall and a stock corral for those who come too late in the day to start the climb. Plainly, we shall not reach Murwa before nightfall, despite Karma's assurances to the contrary; we shall have to press hard just to cross the pass and descend far enough below the snows to find brushwood to keep warm. Lacking mountain lungs, I am slow in the steep places, and I start the climb at once, without waiting for the others to come up.

  Looking back every little while as I ascend, I see that Karma, arriving at the prayer wall, sets out a sheepskin and lies down, while Tende, Dawa, and Tukten perch on rocks. No doubt Karma will build a fire here and delay everyone with a lengthy meal, thus assuring himself and his wife and child the miserable task, at the end of a long day, of setting up camp in cold and dark, for he is as lightheaded as he is light-hearted, and gives the day's end no more thought than anything else. Every piece of information that this smiling man has offered has been wrong: the climb to this pass, it is plain to see, is not only steeper but longer than the last one.

  In the cold wind, the track is icy even at midday, yet one cannot wander to the side without plunging through the crust. The regular slow step that works best on steep mountainside is difficult; I slip and clamber. Far above, a train of yaks makes dark curves on the shining ice; soon a second herd overtakes me, the twine-soled herders strolling up the icy incline with hands clasped behind their backs, grunting and whistling at the heaving animals. Then black goats come clicking up the ice glaze, straight, straight up to the noon sky; the goat horns turn silver on the blue as, in the vertigo and brilliance of high sun, the white peak spins. The goatherd, clad from head t0 boots in blood-red wool, throw balls of snow to keep his beasts in line; crossing the sun, the balls dissolve in a pale fire.

  Eventually the track arrives at the snowfields beneath the summit rim; I am exhausted. Across the whiteness sails a lammergeier, trailing its shadow on the snow, and the wing shadow draws me taut and sends me on. For two more hours I trudge and pant and climb and slip and climb and gasp, dull as any brute, while high above, the prayer flags fly on the westering sun, which turns the cold rocks igneous and the hard sky to white light. Flag shadows dance upon the white walls of the drifts as I enter the shadow of the peak, in an ice tunnel, toiling and heaving, eyes fixed stupidly upon the snow. Then I am in the sun once more, on the last of the high passes, removing my woolen cap to let the wind clear my head; I sink to my knees, exhilarated, spent, on a narrow spine between two worlds.

  To the south and west, glowing in snow light and late sun, the great white Kanjirobas rise in haze, like mystical peaks that might vanish at each moment. The caravans are gone into the underworld. Far behind me and below, in the wastes where I have come from, my companions are black specks upon the snow. Still breathing hard, I listen to the wind in my own breath, the ringing silence, the snow fire and soaring rocks, the relentless tappeting of prayer flags, worn diaphanous, the cast wind pictures to the northern blue.

  I have the universe all to myself. The universe has me all to itself.

  Time resumes, there comes a change in mood. Under the pack, my back is sweating, and the hard wind chills me. Before I am rested, the cold drives me off the peak into a tortuous descent down sharp rock tumulus, hidden by greasy corn snow and glare ice, and my weak legs slip between the rocks as the pack's weight pitches me forward. A thousand feet down, this rockfall changes to a steep snow-patched trail along an icy stream. Toward dusk, in the painful going, I am overtaken by Tukten in his scanty clothes and sneakers. Tukten's indifference to cold and hardship is neither callous nor ascetic: what it seems to be is calm acceptance of everything that comes, and this is the source of that inner quiet that makes his nondescript presence so impressive. He agrees that Murwa is out of the question, and goes on down, still quick and light, to find fuel and a level place to camp.

  The steep ravine descending from the pass comes mt at last on sandy mountainside that drops into the ipper canyon of the Murwa River. Dusk has fallen, and I keep my distance from two herders' fires for fear of the big dogs. Farther on, as darkness comes, I call out, "Tukten, Tuk-ten," but there is no answer. Then, below, I see him making a fire; the inspired man has found a stone shed by a waterfall.

  Dawa turns up an hour later, and lies down in the shed without his supper. Every little while we call to Karma and his family, but another hour passes, the stars shine, and no one comes. This morning a yawning Karma had excused his reluctance to get up by saying we would arrive at Murwa in midaftemoon. Doubtless it was this feckless minstrel who told Jang-bu, who told me, that "one hard day, one easy one" would take us from Saldang to Murwa: two hard days and one easy one are now behind us, and still we are not there. In his airy way, Jang-bu concluded that we could cross both passes in a single day, since neither one, so he was told, was as high or as arduous as the Shey Pass, not to speak of the Kang La. Being ignorant, I didn't argue, though I had to wonder why, if this were true, the wool traders, coming from Saldang, had chosen the Shey Pass-Kang La route over the other. Tonight I know. Because the icy north face of Kang La is too steep for yaks, the traveler must break his own trail in the snow; otherwise that route is much less strenuous than the Shey-Murwa route, in which three passes must be crossed. And the descent from the third pass up there, in snow conditions, is as wearing as the climb. I hate to think of Chiring Lamo in the ice and starlight, swaying along near-precipices on Tende's small and tired shoulders; these ledge trails should not be traveled in the night, without a moon.

  However, I am too tired to act, or even think. I am already in my sleeping bag when this innocent family appears out of the darkness; hearing Tuktens voice, I end these notes and go to sleep.

  NOVEMBER 22

  Last night I was asleep by eight and slept soundly until four, when I awoke in a deep glow of well-being; I am over the high passes before winter, I am going home. Unaccountably, the joy expresses itself in a surge of gratitude to family and friends, who were so generous in those days of D's dying—so many sad and happy memories at once that lying there in the black cold I grow quite warm.

  In D's last hour, Eido Roshi came; he had shaved his head. I held D's right hand, and the Roshi took her left, and we chanted over and over again our Buddhist vows. A little past midnight, effortlessly, D died.

  I left the hospital just before daybreak. It was snowing. Walking through the silent streets, I remembered D's beloved Zen expression: "No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place." Even in this grim winter dawn, everything was as it should be, the snowflakes were falling without effort, all was ca
lm and clear. In her book, she says:

  The flower fulfills its immanence, intelligence implicit in its unfolding.

  There is a discipline.

  The flower grows without mistakes.

  A man must grow himself, until he understands the intelligence of the flower.

  To proceed as though you know nothing, not even your age, nor sex, nor how you look. To proceed as though you were made of gossamer ... a mist that passes through and is passed through and retains its form. A mist that loses its form and still is. A mist that finally dissolves, particles scattered in the sun.

  Tukten brings tea and porridge to my tent, and is routing out the others as I set off down the valley, Dawa is staggering, but he is no malingerer; if he collapses, it is very serious, as there is no doctor in these mountains, and we cannot just abandon him in Murwa. In the hope that he can be helped along to Jumla, we have spread his load amongst ourselves, and Karma has agreed to go as porter as far south and west as Tibrikot, on the Bheri River. Fortunately, our supplies are much diminished, and I discard something every day: it suits my spirits to arrive at Jumla on the wind.

  The upper Murwa is a broad canyon of juniper and lone black-lichened granites, scattered like monuments in a natural pasture that descends in gigantic steps; the river itself has cut a gorge along the east wall of the canyon.

  It is still dark, the sun is far away. To the south, in a wedge of light where the canyon sides converge, the dawn is touching the pink pinnacles of the Kanjirobas. From high across the canyon comes the tinkle of yak bells, and a ghostly smoke arises from the granites: behind a windbreak of heaped sacks, two herders hunch like stone men at their fire, and behind these figures, OM MANI PADME HUM is carved in immense characters on a huge boulder.

  Thinking of a friend's note, received before leaving home, I smile: "I can hardly imagine all the strange and wonderful sights that you will see." At sunset yesterday afternoon, far overhead, a rock turret cast a huge semblance of my silhouette on the high walls. This morning, I find a great round rock split clean as an apple, and in the split as on an altar a stone orb has come to rest, placed so strikingly by elements and cataclysms that its perfection stops me in my tracks, in awe of the wild, murderous, and splendid power of the world.

  I cross a bridge where the torrent swings from the east wall to the west, digging ever deeper into stone to form its gorge, and continue down the mountain in long bounds, carried on waves of gratitude and mirth. My life and work, my children, loves and friendships, past and present—all seem marvelous, full of marvels.

  On a bluff above the river cliffs stands the yak herd first seen yesterday on the snow slopes of the pass, and below this place I see a forest, see each birch and fir. And still the path steeply descends even as the canyon opens out, and the cedar and fir of tree line turn to spruce and pine, until at last Murwa itself comes into view, deep down in morning shadows of the mountain.

  At Murwa, crows replace the ravens, for it is four thousand feet lower than Shey. It is as picturesque as I remember it, a grouping of orderly farms behind stone walls set in patterns on an open slope, under the great wall to the northwest that dams Phoksumdo Lake; the slope ends abruptly at the river cliffs where the Murwa torrent strikes the waterfalls below Phoksumdo.

  Because Dawa is sick and we are all sore and tired after crossing three high passes in four days, the rest of this day will be spent at Murwa, where camp is set up below the spruce forest, by an abandoned farm. In a stock corral nearby are the bright strange tents of a Japanese mountain-climbing expedition, returning from a climb of Kanjiroba. The red tents bring on confused feelings—the re-entry into the twentieth century comes too fast. Still, it is good that the Japanese are here, for the expedition leader is a doctor. But for this improbable encounter, Dawa would have had no help before reaching Jumla. He does not realize how lucky he is, but Tukten does. "Nepali doctors," Tukten says, with a shrug and a sad smile: all the good Nepali doctors leave the country. Our kind benefactor gives Dawa a good going-over, and doses him with bright blue pills that Dawa, miserable though he is, will have to be prodded to ingest four times a day. The doctor thinks he has dysentery, highly contagious, and has pressed preventive dosages on all the rest of us, refusing any payment for his generosity. How we have avoided Dawa's dread disease until this moment is a mystery, since camp procedure is casual, to say the least. I have long since avoided looking at the way our food is handled, and the hands that handle it, since my own would be no better; ironically, until his morale disintegrated, Dawa was much the cleanest of the sherpas, and the only one I ever saw to bathe.

  From the maps of the mountaineering expedition, and from Anu, its head sherpa (a neighbor and friend of Tukten, from Solu Khumbu, near Namche Bazaar), I learn that the peak of Kanjiroba with the precipitous glacier face like a huge ice waterfall—the one I admired from Cave Camp and again from the summit of Somdo mountain, behind Shey—is called Kang Jeralba, the Snows of Jeralba, which is another way of saying Kanjiroba; the true Kanjiroba is farther west, up the Phoksumdo River. Although theirs is the second climb of Kanjiroba, which is more than 23,000 feet high, the route of ascent was a new one, and therefore they may claim that they have conquered it.

  As to names and locations of the passes we have crossed, the map is vague. Where the "Namdo Pass" should be is a pass called Lang-mu Shey, or "Long Pass in Shey Region"—a good description of the pass between Shey and Saldang. Yesterday's pass is located correctly and is known as Bugu La; it is 16,575 feet in altitude. According to Anu Sherpa, "Bugu" refers to a struggle that took place between a mountain god— Nurpu, perhaps?—and a demon who wished to kill him: at Murwa, the god vanquished the demon, who perished in this torrent beneath the falls.

  I am grateful to the mountaineers, but the bright tents and foreign faces, like the mail at Shey, are an intrusion, and the high spirits of the upper Murwa die away. Sunlight will not come until late morning and will be gone not long thereafter: the world is dark. Two hours ago, it might have struck me as quite wonderful that the sun will never touch this tent, where its worshiper awaits its warmth, to wash; now I allow this to become a source of anger, and such foolishness annoys me all the more—have I learned nothing? Imperturbable, Tukten observes me; I glare coldly. That crazy joy, that transport, which made me feel as I ran down the mountain that I might jump out of my skin, leap free of gravity, as I do so often these days in my dreams—was that no more than pure relief at crossing the last high pass? If so, how sad it seems to celebrate the end of precious days at Crystal Mountain. Perhaps I left too soon; perhaps a great chance has been wasted; had I stayed at Shey until December, the snow leopard might have shown itself at last. These doubts fill me with despair. In worrying about the future, I despoil the present; in my escape, I leave a true freedom behind.

  To an evergreen grove on the cliffs above the Suli Gad, below the village, I take this notebook and a few chapatis, desperate to get away from humankind. Not that I have talked much in this silent time, for in my party, only Tukten speaks a litde English, and we have long since exhausted our few subjects; Tukten and I communicate much better without speaking. One of these Japanese has some English, too, but neither of us wishes to take advantage of it; the mountaineers must be as sorry as myself to meet a foreigner in such strange country.

  The ponderous water rush, the peaks, the concord of brown habitations of worn stone are very soothing: I sit on sunny lichens, hidden from the wind, feeling much better. Above the falls, the rampart that contains Lake-by-the-Forest fills the sky. Up there, a month ago, a young girl gave me cheese from a wood flagon, and men on silvered saddles, cantering by, called out that the snow was much too deep to cross Kang La.

  In early afternoon, the sun is pierced by the snow pinnacle to westward, and I rise, stiff and old, and return to camp. It is very cold. The fields are stubble, and the people stand huddled on the path, waiting for winter. A cold wind blows up dust in whirlwinds, so violent and choking that I move my tent into an empty she
d beneath the abandoned farm. Then down off Bugu La come strangers from the north: they invade the house and drive their dzo into a stall behind my tent, uprooting the tent stays in the process. Resurrecting the tent, I lie awake most of the night, wondering what sort of cud this beast is chewing.

  The Murwa people are denouncing what they call "the tiger," which last night killed a young yak above the village. Tomorrow I leave the snow peaks and descend the Suli Gad, and the last hope of seeing the snow leopard will be gone.

  NOVEMBER 23

  I wake refreshed and lie awhile, listening to the great rush of the falls. Dawa is better already, I can hear him singing. At daybreak, as I leave our camp, Karma gives me a spruce stave that he cut yesterday as a surprise present: his joy in his own generosity is so infectious that I laugh aloud. Tende is warming Chiring Lamo's bottom over the fire, and Tukten is cooking the neck of the yak—killed by the snow leopard—which he acquired from the new friends he had made here. Tukten is cook on this expedition as well as everything else, and on this outward journey will be paid as a head sherpa, provided he does not mention this to Dawa.

  At the Murwa stupa I place upon the wall of my shards of prayer stone, on an impulse not to carry them away from Dolpo. Officially, the whole Suli Gad valley lies in Dolpo, just as Dolpo, geopolitically, lies in Nepal. But it is here at the head of the river, under the snow peaks and the waterfall that thunders down out of the magic lake, that I shall pass from one world to another.

  Already this place seems far away, although I am still here. In Rohagaon, the next village to the south, there are no prayer walls, and Masta takes the place of Nuipu; below Rohagaon lie the villages of the Bheri Valley, and the first scent of Hindu attars from the plains of the great Ganga that bears away all whisper of Sh'ang-Sh'ung into the sea.